Newspaper: Obama 'stimulus' clearly a failure

From an editorial in Investor's Business Daily:

Those who pushed through this year's $787 billion fiscal "stimulus" seem to be counting on the American people's short memory. Wasn't it just last year that we were told, repeatedly and with stark emphasis, that this economy was the "worst" since the Great Depression?

That was the pretense for not only the stimulus, but for the federal takeover of the U.S. auto industry and the quasi-takeover of the U.S. financial industry. It's also the underlying premise for both nationalized health care and massive new taxes to cut CO2 emissions.

If the stimulus passed, the White House vowed, unemployment would peak at 8%. Today, it's 9.5% — and rising.

"The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy," said Biden. He used that phrase — "the truth is," or something similar — at least three times in a talk with ABC's George Stephanopolous. But the "truth is" something quite different.

Many voices — including ours — were raised in opposition to the stimulus when it was debated. We didn't "misread" the economy. We knew from history that, left alone, it would get better without government meddling.

Instead, Americans were promised "shovel ready" projects would put stimulus money to work right away creating jobs. For the record, since February, the month the stimulus was passed, the U.S. has lost 2 million jobs. The stimulus is clearly a failure.

Read the full editorial at the newspaper's Web site.