Why Isn't Anyone Celebrating the Fifth Anniversary of the Great Obama Stimulus?

RUSH: This is an anniversary. February 17th is an anniversary. You know what it is? This is the fifth anniversary of Obama's stimulus. Nobody noticed, did they? Nobody's out celebrating it. Nobody's reminding you of it. Nobody is calling your attention to it. Nobody is applauding it. Nobody's doing stories on how much it mattered. We're not getting any stories from the media about all the great things that happened as a result of the stimulus. We're getting a big, fat zero, goose egg. Nothing.

The media are not crowing about it much. I do have an article here from the Wall Street Journal pointing out what you and I all know, that the stimulus did not help lower the unemployment rate as was promised. The only reason the jobless rate's gone down at all is due to more people leaving the workforce. We're not creating any jobs. It points out that only 10% of the Obama stimulus went to infrastructure. You know, the building of roads, the repairing of schools, the building of bridges.

All of those wonderful things that were highlighted with the stimulus was what we we're gonna use this almost $1 trillion for. There is nothing to show for it but added debt. In fact, you could make the case that the stimulus has retarded economic growth and recovery, held it back. You could make the case that the stimulus has led to higher unemployment -- and you know why, folks? Because it wasn't a stimulus.

You have an economy, and it's slowed down. It's chugging along. It's just barely moving. You need to do something to goose it, so you stimulate it. You pump a bunch of money into it. You put money into it, you put that money to work for you, and that money starts circulating in the form of commerce, and that commerce revives a moribund economy, and it grows, and businesses start making more profits, and they start hiring more people.

That's what the $1 trillion was supposed to do. However, that is theory only. It can only work -- and even then, questionably. A stimulus like that can only work if you have a trillion dollars laying around somewhere that is not part of the economy, and we don't have that. If you could find a trillion dollars somewhere that was not part of the economy -- it was just lying around idle, it wasn't in circulation, it wasn't being used -- and you throw that in there, maybe.

But we don't have a trillion dollars that's sitting around doing nothing -- even if we print it, even if we borrow it -- because we are already $16 trillion, $17 trillion in debt, and there are debt service payments the government has to make every month, every year. There is no way that we could stimulate the economy because, whether we printed it or whether we borrowed it, the trillion dollars had to first be taken away from the economy before it could be put back into it.

So the stimulus was a net wash. It was a push. It cancelled itself out. Even if you raise taxes to get the trillion dollars, you're still taking the money out of the economy you want to stimulate. You cannot stimulate an economy by taking a trillion dollars out of it and then re-injecting it, putting it back in. Net zero. Net wash. There's no change. If you print the money and throw it back into the economy, no way -- and that's not what happened anyway. Fully 90% of the stimulus went to unions and states and state employees.

Ninety percent of the stimulus was part of what I describe as a money-laundering scheme. It was spent to keep union workers employed, government union workers state after state after state employed so that they would continue to pay union dues, and the union dues, as you know and I know, all end up, a vast majority of that money gets spent on the Democrat Party.

Now, back then, Obama didn't think he could go to the Treasury and write a check from the US Treasury to himself or to the Democrat Party. So what he had to do was get a trillion dollars and give it to union people. They washed it, they cleaned it, they stayed employed, they paid their dues, and the dues ends up back in the coffers of the Democrat Party and various candidates to buy ads, to run campaigns or what have you. That's what 90% of that stimulus did. Ten percent actually went toward things Obama promised.

Now, today, five years later, with Obama just any time he wants making up a law, not enforcing a law, altering a law, if Obama decided the Treasury was going to fund the Democrat Party's campaign next year and they wanted to write a check, he might be thinking, you know, I could probably get away with that now. Nobody's gonna stop me. I use that as an illustration only. They're not to that point yet, but that's what the stimulus was. Look at your own family. You want to stimulate your own family's economic situation, and if somebody gave you $50,000 you didn't have, and you didn't have to pay back, free and clear, no taxes on it whatsoever, that 50 grand would certainly stimulate your family.

But, if that $50,000 you had to give them first before they gave it back to you, it's a wash, right? Well, that's what the stimulus was, because we don't have a trillion dollars sitting around not doing anything. If we borrow it, there's debt service on it. If we print it, there's inflation. There's just no way. That stimulus never had a prayer. It was a PR gimmick from beginning to end. And that's why, on the fifth anniversary of the great stimulus that was gonna reignite the economy and erase all the memories of every bad thing Bush did, there's not even a mention of it in the media.

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, there's one other thing to remember about Obama's nearly $1 trillion stimulus and another one of the real hidden reasons for it. Reason number one, obviously funding unions. But the second reason was that it raised or expanded the baseline on the federal budget by a trillion dollars. And the baseline, of course, is where every new budget starts. So after adding a trillion dollars in spending, the new baseline goes way, way up, and therefore every spending item in the next budget went up accordingly, because the baseline went up. It drove the budget from three to three and a half trillion dollars, is in effect what it did. And that became the new baseline.

Now, the Journal doesn't explain how that happened, but it was because the Democrats never did a real budget. They were doing continuing resolutions, and that became the floor, the new three and a half trillion with the stimulus added to it. So it was a gimmick, it was a trick from the get-go disguised as a PR message. They told the low-information crowd, "We're gonna rebuild your bridges and your roads and your schools." And they're not rebuilt even now. They're not repaired even now. Nothing was done on any of that.

Quit trashing Obama’s accomplishments.

He has done more than any other President before him.

Here is a list of his impressive accomplishments:

First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.

First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.

First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.

First President to violate the War Powers Act.

First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.

First President to spend a trillion dollars on “shovel-ready” jobs when there was no such thing as “shovel-ready” jobs.

First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.

First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.

First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.

First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.

First President to tell a CEO of a major corporation (Chrysler) to resign.

First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.

First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer and to say that America is no longer a Christian nation.

First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.

First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.

First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke out on the reasons for their rate increases.

First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.

First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).

First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.

First President to actively try to bankrupt an American industry (coal).

First President to fire an inspector general of AmeriCorps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.

First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.

First President to surround himself with radical left wing anarchists.

First President to golf more than 150 separate times in his five years in office.

First President to hide his birth, medical, educational and travel records.

First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.

First President to go on multiple “global apology tours” and concurrent “insult our friends” tours.

First President to go on over 17 lavish vacations, in addition to date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayers.

First President to have personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.

First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.

First President to fly in a personal trainer from Chicago at least once a week at taxpayer expense.

First President to repeat the Holy Quran and tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth

First President to side with a foreign nation over one of the American 50 states (Mexico vs Arizona).

First President to tell the military men and women that they should pay for their own private insurance because they “volunteered to go to war and knew the consequences.”

Then he was the First President to tell the members of the military that THEY were UNPATRIOTIC for balking at the last sggestion. (Thank God he didn’t get away with THIS one.)

How is this hope and change’ working out for you?

It’s hard to comprehend all this guy has gotten away with.

Any other president would have been impeached!!!!

What in God’s name is wrong with our government that they allow his guy

carte blanc. It absolutely boggles my mind.

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