The prevailing story that liberals have hung their hat on for the last couple of years is Obama can’t win because he was strung with funding two wars. No economy can sustain that. Case closed. Sounds simple enough. Numbers should back that one up, right?
Look close at that again. Make sense? Try again. Without going into a whole lot of detail, quite simply, in his first year, Barack Obama spent more on his stimulus than the entire Iraq War. The CBO puts the actual cost of the Iraqi war at $709 billion. Not the $3 trillion cited by Obama.
It’s not that he was slightly wrong on an estimate or anything, he was way off. No one has a clue where that number came from. That amounts to about $100 billion a year. To put it in perspective, his stimulus plans have accounted for about $800 billion. A year. All those wonderful things he could have done with that $3 trillion never would have existed. He lied to you.
To put it in proper perspective, his one year of stimulus cost us more than the entire eight years of the Iraq War. Raise your hands, how many people benefited from the stimulus? We could have benefitted probably, but his special interests got it first. I’m not in a union, it didn’t do squat for me.
If we couldn’t afford those wars, then it’s obvious we can’t afford Obama.
H/T: K2
Originally posted at Moonage Political Webdream.
Categories: Economics, Idiots, Iraq
Tags: cost, Iraq, Obama, stimulus
The Modern Liberal Part I – Reasonable Members 
Why Our Governments Never Last… (In Case You Have Wondered) 
Obama Culture Shock; 51% Of Viewers Will Watch The Tonight Show No Matter What 
Celebrate Human Achievement Hour 
The Fiddlers Of Washington… 
Where Government Money Comes From 
Perfectly true of course, but I’m waiting for the next “IT’s ALL BUSH’s FAULT!!!” comment.
{shhh… usually when i point that out, they don’t rear their ugly heads. but let’s lie low and see. i could be wrong.}
Waiting, Mo? It’s their permanent meme. The zombies chant and drone on and on, shamelessly, this lie.
Of course! But when I preempt them they don’t have the nerve to comment. I need to quit stealing their thunder.
Mo – ya got me quakin’ in my boots at the throw-down!!
More info from the CBO which you prob’ly missed since Glenn and Rush wouldn’t have mentioned it.
STIMULUS ADDED MILLIONS OF JOBS IN Q2
6:34pm EDT
By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The massive U.S. stimulus package put millions of people to work and boosted national output by hundreds of billions of dollars in the second quarter, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.
CBO’s latest estimate indicates that the stimulus effort, which remains a political hot potato ahead of the November congressional elections, may have prevented the sluggish U.S. economy from contracting between April and June.
CBO said President Barack Obama’s stimulus boosted real GDP in the quarter by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent, adding at least $200 billion in economic activity.
During that time the economy was growing at an anemic pace.
Gross domestic product rose just 0.6 percent during that period, according to preliminary Commerce Department data which economists expect will be revised sharply lower when new figures are released on Friday.
The massive package of tax cuts, construction spending and enhanced safety-net benefits was passed in February 2009 in the midst of the deepest recession since the 1930s.
It raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of this year, CBO estimated.
Measured another way, CBO said the stimulus increased the number of full-time equivalent jobs by up to 4.8 million, as part-time workers shifted to full-time work or employers offered more overtime work.
CBO said the package, officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, would cost $814 billion, down from its previous estimate of $862 billion. The lower figure was thanks largely to health-care subsidies that cost less than anticipated. CBO initially estimated the bill would worsen budget deficits by $787 billion.
Other than that, the estimate varies only slightly from the budget office’s forecast released in May.
As for the “great deal” we got on the Iraq war, here are a few more statistics to chew on:
$900 Billion – taxpayer dollars spent on Iraq war as of Sept. 2010
and….another cost which you may have forgotten about:
4,416 – American casualties (54% under age 25)
32,000 – Americans with serious injuries
100,000-600,000 Iraqi civilian casualties
Just trying to keep it Fair and Balanced
CBO – Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Meanwhile whither Obama’s “Recovery Summer”? Why, it’s become a GOP Campaign issue!
1) The point of my comment was to respond to the premise of the original post which was “keeping the costs of the two wars ‘in perspective’ with the costs of the stimulus package.” Do you dispute the financial and human suffering costs stated above?
2) If you discount the CBO as “garbage in, garbage out” and instead rely on how “Americans feel”, that is akin to saying, “we don’t care if empirical evidence proves the earth is round, a plurality of Americans think it’s flat so that’s what I’m going with”
Well, good luck with that in November. BTW – speaking of Garbage, your Iraq casualties are totally discredited, even the Guardian had to back off from the upper number of 600,000 because the lancet survey didn’t distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths.
BTW – more stimulus awesomeness:
Remember when the housing bubble burst, kicking off the recession? Note the numbers for this July:
I’m going to guess someone else beat me to this one, but your timing is immaculate. By next month Obama’s economy will remind everyone of Jimmy Carter’s.
Beast beat me to it (and better stated and supported, I might add).
There’s talk about another recession looming, and the Dow tumbled today in reaction to the continuing weak economy.
Obama’s policies are NOT helping the economy, regardless of what Andrew Sullivan [color me unsurprised that you're quoting an article from him] reports. {Edit: wrong “Sullivan”…But from what I’ve researched, “Andy” is more liberal than “The Daily Dish” Andrew}
This all doesn’t change the fact that 75% of the population is still concerned over jobs.
Hey Mo, remember when the Stimulus was going to keep unemployment below 8%?
Help me, the argument has been that the Iraq War created the economic downturn. It’s all over the net. That’s what I’m discussing. You can imply the esoteric value of the things you tossed out there all you want, but the reality is what it is, the Iraq war economically is small change compared to what Obama has done in literally months. The war created jobs both in soldiers and equipment, so the same argument applies as your “saved millions of jobs” argument. Only difference is the Iraq War cost less and lasted eight years, Obama’s cost more and lasted less than one. Now, that’s the meat of the situation. Anyone knows that committing to a war is going to cost lives and injuries, whereas Obama’s trillion dollar giveaway will limit the ability in the future to spend money helping those people. So, the inferred moral injustices are not a lot different. The CBO IS GIGO for the simple reason that a lot of those jobs would have been funded by traditional means, but were moved into ARPA for the sake of making it look like it was working NOW. Now that the money has run out, existing programs that had traditional funding have been discontinued. See HEAP for example. It didn’t fix anything, it simply postponed it basically six months. NOW you’re seeing the ramifications of Marxist economic stimulus in action. What’s that headline we had today?
The CBO can only work with the numbers they’re given, hence Garbage In Garbage out. Witness this report by Peter Suderman in March:
Catch that? The numbers were set up so that even if the stimulus hadn’t done a whit of good the rosy result would have been the same.
The CBO doesn’t even consider what the economy would have been like had the stimulus not passed. They run on assumptions based not on observation of the actual economy, but on mathematical models which assume stimulus spending automatically equals growth and jobs saved, whether it really happens or not!
As for the Beast’s invocation of public perception of the failure of the stimulus, it falls into the “don’t piss down my neck and tell me it’s raining” category. The people know when they’re being fed a load of hooey.
The Stimulous Package is better described as the “Delayulous” Package…all it did was delay the inevitable and enlarge the wallets of the TBTF financial houses. Not looking forward to the coming financial collapse. We haven’t seen anything yet.