Obama vs. the Allies

NY Post ^ | June 29, 2010 | Rich Lowry

[Scanian]

A specter is haunting the world: the specter of Canada.

To hear President Obama's supporters tell it, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a one-man economic wrecking crew. He led the charge at the G-8 summit to endorse the goal of advanced nations cutting their deficits in half by 2013. Obama only reluctantly went along, warning of the ill effects of what the intellectual architects of his stimulus package plaintively call "premature austerity."

This dreaded austerity has treated our friendly neighbors to the north quite well. If deficit spending is the engine of growth, Canada should be a nation of Hoovervilles. Although it adopted a temporary stimulus during the current recession, Canada drastically cut spending as a percentage of GDP from the mid-1990s to 2008.

In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes compares Canada's economic situation with that of America: "Its unemployment rate is lower, its budget deficit breathtakingly smaller (after nearly a decade of balanced budgets), its debt burden far lighter, its banks more stable." It's enough to put the most spectacularly boring phrase in journalism -- "worthwhile Canadian initiative" -- in a new light.

In contrast to Harper, Obama has become the world's great evangelist for debt. What he won't do for human rights, he'll do for red ink.

[Joe Boucher]

Obammy wants to destroy the U.S.A., not make its economy better, stronger.

[Jack Hammer]

‘To hear President Obama’s supporters tell it...’

You mean the gang of morons and criminals who are flushing the United States down the toilet? Thanks, not interested.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

"[Canada's] unemployment rate is lower, its budget deficit breathtakingly smaller (after nearly a decade of balanced budgets), its debt burden far lighter, its banks more stable."

Bah! What's a little ginned-up, phony empirical evidence? Who ya going to believe? This balderdash of empirical evidence? Or the true theories of Keynes, Marx and Lenin? Everybody knows where the truth lies!

[Corporate Law]

I would trade Obama for Harper every day of the week.

[Michel12]

Harper or even the Canadian liberals... who started the deficit reduction.

[canuck_conservative]

Stephen Harper’s background is economics, he was university-educated for it, and he worked in that role for many years for the conservative Fraser Institute.

Meanwhile, Obama smoked marijuana and crack.

Whose opinion would you trust more?

[DrC]

“If deficit spending is the engine of growth, Canada should be a nation of Hoovervilles.”

Conversely, if this proposition were correct, the U.S. and PIIGS nations should be leading the world out of recession. In actual fact, homelessness in the U.S. is now at a record high, suggesting just how badly Obama’s leftist agenda actually serves those it is intended to help.