Is Obama ruining the economy on purpose

IBD:

The Obama administration's latest idea for "stimulating" the economy is — you guessed it — more spending. Is this just a campaign ploy, or is the White House ruining the economy on purpose?

The president's latest plan calls for another $50 billion in stimulus for infrastructure. As the White House puts it, this represents a "bold vision for renewing and expanding our transportation infrastructure — in a plan that combines a long-term vision for the future with new investments."

But why in the world do we need another stimulus when we're not even close to exhausting the funds allocated for the last one?

According to Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, $275 billion of the initial $787 billion cost of that stimulus remains unspent. And of the $512 billion that has been spent, just $18.5 billion — or less than 7% — has been paid out by the Transportation Department, the main government infrastructure provider.

This is strange, since the stimulus was originally sold to us as a way to create "shovel-ready" jobs on infrastructure. Instead, much of the money was drained away for financially strapped states to keep their public unions and Medicaid programs afloat.

Here's what President Obama said about the stimulus bill he signed into law Feb. 17, 2009:

"Because of this investment, nearly 400,000 men and women will go to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, repairing our faulty dams and levees, bringing critical broadband connections to businesses and homes in nearly every community in America, upgrading mass transit, building high-speed rail lines that will improve travel and commerce throughout our nation."

Sounded great at the time, but few, if any, of those things got done. Moreover, since the recession began, federal employment has jumped by 10%, or nearly 200,000 positions, while private-sector employment has plunged 7%, or 7.8 million jobs. So who really benefited from the stimulus? Big Government and its unions.

The stimulus did do one thing, however: It set the stage for massive spending and an unprecedented expansion of the role of the U.S. government in the American economy. This, in retrospect, appears to be the real aim of the Democratic stimulus — not jobs or infrastructure or any other real-world accomplishment.

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The stimulus plan did something else. It discredited liberalism. The idea that big government and spending will produce prosperity should be dead for at least a generation or more if we are lucky. It seems pretty clear that "tax cuts for the wealthy" generate more jobs and growth for the economy.