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Obama supports stimulus while more lose jobs

                This last Wednesday, July 1, 2009, President Barack Obama spoke at a town hall meeting in Annandale, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC to talk about his new healthcare reform plans. During that meeting, President Obama stated that his massive spending bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which most call the economic stimulus bill, was working. What President Obama forgot to mention was that the very same day, the rate of unemployment rose.

                The Obama administration’s push to pass the economic stimulus package was so hard that politicians were told not to read the bill despite it costing the American people more than a trillion dollars after interest while the country was already deep in debt. One politician was dragged from a funeral in order to sign the bill. It turned out that this bill was primarily pork, with billions going towards special interest projects that many had never even heard of before the bill came to light. The public was told that job loss would be minimal and the economy would begin to get back on track if the bill was passed. 

                On Wednesday, it was reported that the unemployment rate rose to 9.5% in June. This means almost one in ten is without a job. In some parts of the country it is much worse. In addition to that, the rate at which jobs were lost has also risen. In May, 322,000 jobs were lost, but in June 467,000 jobs were lost. Despite this fact, President Obama decided to re-stump for his old bill, and failed to mention that it was not doing what he promised it would do, “Don’t let people fool you with this notion that somehow the reason for our deficit has to do with the Recovery Act. The Recovery Act was designed to make sure that local school districts didn’t lay off teachers… and it’s done its job.” We were originally told that the economic stimulus bill was to ensure that the economy get back on its feet and not to protect specific government workers from getting the proverbial boot. In addition to this, anyone can see that the Recovery Act has obviously not done its job, considering the fact that the rate at which people are being laid off is rising. 

                President Obama is right about one thing. Our current economic state will not fix itself in a month. The unemployment rate is likely to get worse before it gets better. But to call something a success we should at least have see a measurable improvement in the rate at which people are losing their jobs. When we see less people filing for unemployment next month than we did this month, we can begin to come around to thinking it might be a success. We can say that it is decidedly a success when less people lose their jobs then before for several months, and then finally people start returning to work. That is the definition of success. Using Orwellian definitions of the word “success” does not make anything about the Recovery Act a success, but real, hard numbers will.