The Voice of Young Conservatives Blog

President Obama is enjoying his vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. I’m not here to begrudge the man some time off. But while he’s been swimming in the Atlantic the political sandcastle’s his administration has built are being washed away.

The administration’s economic policy successes were all built for short-term success without consideration of the long-term harm.  As Josh Brown described on the blog The Reformed Broker,

We were promised stimulus, programs and policies that would have lasting effects.  What we got instead was a trillion dollar sand castle.  Now that the inexorable tides have eroded away our leadership’s best-laid (and funded) plans, someone needs to be held accountable. . . In hindsight, virtually all of the fiscal stimulus and extraordinary programs adopted by this administration now look like they merely forestalled the inevitable.  Hiring has not happened and in the meantime, housing is headed down another leg and the almost-resillient consumer is back to playing hard-to-get.

Cash for Clunkers created an artificial bubble that led to a boom for car sales and car manufacturers. As soon as the government removed the incentive the bubble popped and the car market collapsed. It turns out that the only thing the program really did was convince a bunch of people who may have bought a car in the next year to buy a car during this particular month. Ditto for programs like the First-Time Home Buyers’ Tax Credit.

But the mother of all sandcastles – the stimulus – is now eroding back into the earth, leaving a gaping hole of government debt in its place. The overwhelming majority of the stimulus has already been spent. What do we have to show for it? The number of jobless claims has risen in each of the past four weeks and last week it hit its highest point in nine months. A report issued today by the U.S. Commerce Department found that the economy only grew by 1.6 percent in the second quarter. For some perspective, the economy needs to grow at about 2.5 percent just to keep unemployment from going any higher. Even larger growth would be needed to begin to combat the pervasive joblessness that now plagues our nation.

Even if you’re willing to argue that the stimulus was a success in terms of keeping unemployment down it appears that it merely delayed our problems. Unwilling to admit this fact, many liberal thinkers have taken to thinking that we should have simply built a bigger sandcastle. Given the economy is still sputtering, it’s obvious that $800 billion just didn’t do the trick, so we should have gone bigger! Nevermind the fact that the U.S. stimulus was the largest governmental infusion of funds amongst any nation and the biggest in U.S. history, including the Great Depression.

Regardless of what we should have done, the stimulus is what we did. Now we find ourselves unsure about whether the stimulus created any jobs but absolutely sure are nation’s finances are in dire straights. Rather than attempt to understand the forces of the tide, the Obama administration hastily built economic sandcastles. Should be be that surprised that they have now washed away?

by Brandon Greife, Political Director