The Obama administration really knows no shame. It continues to say that its economic policies, and especially its stimulus plan, has created or saved a gigantic amount of jobs; a figure nobody can possibly hope to check.
Yet, the MSM play along. Except for Fox News, there is not one big news outlet willing to criticize the administration for its blatant attempt to lie to the public about the impact its economic policies have.
From a fiscal conservative perspective, Obama’s distorting, spinning and propaganda is extra dangerous, because the media’s willingness to play along and to function as a propaganda arm of the White House, means many Americans will be made to believe that Big Government works. Even when it does not.
See for instance this post by Ed Morrissey, who explains that the only jobs ‘saved’ are bureaucratic jobs:
The “majority of funds” came from state governments because Porkulus distributed the money in block grants to the states. What did the states do with that money? They did save jobs, but primarily bureaucratic jobs. States used the money to temporarily paper over budget gaps which would have forced the layoffs of state employees, which should have been a necessary step in slimming down state-level spending…
The White House can claim that they saved the job of teachers, police officers, and firefighters whose jobs were never in jeopardy, and New Hampshire [and other states] avoided cutting jobs elsewhere by shifting the money to cover budget shortfalls.
Meanwhile, what happens to these jobs when Porkulus runs out? Almost none of these jobs are established on new economic growth. They’re either jobs that New Hampshire has to fund anyway (teachers, police officers, firefighters) or one-off project jobs that will disappear when the money does.
The Obama plan will cost jobs in the long run. At the very moment he took office, Obama declared war on the free market and capitalism; the two things that made the U.S. great in the first place.
Of course, we all knew social democrats and socialists would use propaganda to deceive the electorate. That’s not surprising nor shocking. But it is shocking that so many news organizations are letting them get away with it. Notice how the above criticism didn’t come from an established news organization, but from a conservative blog; the only ones willing to dig. And thát, not Congress or the White House, is the real problem nowadays.
Infuriating, there’s no other way to describe the way the ‘fourth estate’ is evading its responsibilities.
/