August, 2016, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: The Still Failing Obama Economy, Democrats Hypocrisy On the Minimum Wage, and Interpol Goes For The Second Amendment

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc. In fact, last month we set a record, needing ten full posts to cover it all.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

It looks like our politicians have been especially insane over the past month or so let’s get started with the latest insanity from today’s American politicians:

1) We have often reviewed how the Obama administration had some of the most favorable economic tailwinds when it came to getting a recovery started after the last recession:

1. The administration launched a massive (and failed) economic stimulus program that cost the American taxpayer well over $800 billion.
2. The energy market experienced a massive and historic drop in energy prices that should have fueled other consumer and business segments of the economy.
3. The Federal Reserve pumped trillions of fake dollars into the economy.

Despite massive government spending, an energy price drop, and the Fed trying to rev the economy with trillions of dollars, the latest economic news and data from the government proves that this administration fumbled the ball badly when it comes to economic strategy and plans:

• The Wall Street Journal recently published data which shows the Obama recovery was the weakest recovery since at least World War II.
• Despite it being seven years since the last recession, this recovery has created less economic growth than previous, shorter business recession recoveries.
• The average annual economic growth during the Obama recovery has been only 2.1% despite the above tailwinds, far below the historical average of over 3%, according to the latest data from the Commerce Department.
• Only one previous economic recovery did not attain a 3% average growth rate but that was over only six years, not the already seven years of the Obama recovery.
• And news last week was not much better, showing that the economy grew at a 1.2% annual rate in the second quarter of this year.

Just another example that even when the political class, in this case the Obama administration, has everything going for them, stimulus, low energy prices, Fed cash infusion, they still screw it up.

2) Many Democrats are very vocal when the assert that the Federal minimum wage needs to be raised to $15 an hour. We pointed out many times in this blog, highlighting areas in the country that have already dramatically raised the minimum wage, that this type of economic nonsense may raise the wage rate for some people but it eliminates jobs for many others altogether: the good news is that your wages went up. The bad news is there are not any jobs available for you at the new wage rate.

But today’s discussion is not about bad economic policy but rather Democratic hypocrisy. They want to raise the minimum wage to $15 but they did not display that kind of generosity during their recent Presidential campaign:

• The Democratic National Committee had to resort to hiring part time people to fill the seats at their recent convention, according to the website, www.constitution.com.
• But rather than putting their money where their mouth was, they paid the temporary hires only $50 for seven hours work.
• This comes out to about $7.14 an hour, less than half of the minimum wage rate they constantly scream about.
• To add insult to injury, anyone who took the job for $7.14 an hour could not leave their seat even for a bathroom break. 
• This hypocrisy was advertised online with the following Craigslist screen shot of the ad:

Typical political class hypocrisy. You have to have Obama Care and the badness that it is but we do not. You cannot do insider stock trading but we can. You have to pay workers $15 an hour but we do not. Pathetic set of people.

3) What Obama, Hillary Clinton and many other liberals want to do is to make it more and more difficult for Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights and not have their rights to own firearms abridged. Despite Obama’s track record of releasing criminal illegal immigrants loose on our streets and the desire to take in more and more refugees from the very dangerous Middle East, and Hillary’s desires to do the same type of actions that put more and more Americans in danger from dangerous individual criminals and terrorists, they seek to disarm Americans as much as possible in the face of these increased dangers.

Maybe they should take pause and get a reality and common sense check relative to what the international police agency, Interpol, recently said:

• Interpol recently proclaimed that allowing citizens to carry guns in public is the most effective way to prevent terrors attacks.
• Notice how Interpol did not say that making increasingly difficult for Americans to carry guns in public was an effective way to prevent terror attacks.
• ABC News recently interviewed Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble:

Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said today the U.S. and the rest of the democratic world is at a security crossroads in the wake of last month’s deadly al-Shabab attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya – and suggested an answer could be in arming civilians.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Noble said there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called “soft targets” are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.

“Societies have to think about how they’re going to approach the problem,” Noble said. “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.” …

Citing a recent call for al Qaeda “brothers to strike soft targets, to do it in small groups,” Noble said law enforcement is now facing a daunting task.

“How do you protect soft targets? That’s really the challenge. You can’t have armed police forces everywhere,” he told reporters. “It’s Interpol’s view that one way you protect soft targets is you make it more difficult for terrorist to move internationally. So what we’re trying to do is to establish a way for countries … to screen passports, which are a terrorist’s best friend, try to limit terrorists moving from country to country. And also, that we’re able to share more info about suspected terrorists.”

In the interview with ABC News, Noble was more blunt and directed his comments to his home country.

“Ask yourself: If that (Westgate terror attack) was Denver, Col., if that was Texas, would those guys have been able to spend hours, days, shooting people randomly?” Noble said, referring to states with pro-gun traditions. “What I’m saying is it makes police around the world question their views on gun control. It makes citizens question their views on gun control. You have to ask yourself, ‘Is an armed citizenry more necessary now than it was in the past with an evolving threat of terrorism?’ This is something that has to be discussed.'”

Arming civilians has greatly reduced crime and terror attacks in such places as Switzerland and Israel. Why is such common sense so often lost on people like Obama and Hillary Clinton?

Enough insanity for today. The lack of common sense on guns in a terror infested world, massive hypocrisy on wages from Democrats, and the Obama recovery is still failing. More insanity in the days to come.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

October, 2015, Part 6, Political Class Insanity: Fudging the Numbers At The Pentagon, Diminishing Economic Freedom and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity post we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history

Over the next two days we should wrap up the political class insanity that has rained down on us in just the past month or so, an effort that will likely take us a full seven days to document and review:

1) Despite his grandiose campaign promise that he would operate the “most transparent Presidential administration ever,” we have shown dozens and dozens of times that he has actually operated the most opaque, secretive, and deceptive Presidency of all time. He has stifled and block Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, he has spied on journalists, he has sent the IRS after his political opponents, he has released FOIA information that was severely redacted and useless, his Justice Department has illegally destroyed government documents, his Justice Department has ignored requests from Congress for government documents, his administration has illegally tried to charge Americans for FOIA requests, he has tried to silence whistle blowers, etc. 

And now we find out that we have a very serious breach of integrity and accurate information as it relates to the fight against terrorism and within the Defense Department. Over four dozen professional intelligence experts within the Defense Department have claimed that national security intelligence reports on the major terrorist organizations around the world are being altered to show a more favorable slant for Obama's failing war on terror. These intelligence analysts, working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), have made the accusation that the information they are developing is being altered to downplay various terror organizations’ strength.

According to a report from the Daily Beast, senior officials are changing the information: “The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official told the reporter. What started with accusations from two senior intelligence analysts has now been strengthened with another four dozen or so analysts supporting the claim.

The Daily Beast, an entity that usually loves anything Obama is involved in, reported the following atrocities of data integrity:

"The accusations suggest that a large number of people tracking the inner workings of the terror groups think that their reports are being manipulated to fit a public narrative. The allegations echoed charges that political appointees and senior officials cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons program in 2002 and 2003.

Some of those CENTCOM analysts described the sizeable cadre of protesting analysts as a “revolt” by intelligence professionals who are paid to give their honest assessment, based on facts, and not to be influenced by national-level policy. The analysts have accused senior-level leaders, including the director of intelligence and his deputy in CENTCOM, of changing their analyses to be more in line with the Obama administration’s public contention that the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda is making progress. The analysts take a more pessimistic view about how military efforts to destroy the groups are going…

The complaints allege that in some cases key elements of intelligence reports were removed, resulting in a document that didn’t accurately capture the analysts’ conclusions, sources familiar with the protest said. But the complaint also goes beyond alleged altering of reports and accuses some senior leaders at CENTCOM of creating an unprofessional work environment. One person who knows the contents of the written complaint sent to the inspector general said it used the word “Stalinist” to describe the tone set by officials overseeing CENTCOM’s analysis."

Many described a climate in which analysts felt they could not give a candid assessment of the situation in Iraq and Syria. Some felt it was a product of commanders protecting their own career advancement by putting the best spin on the war.

As always, if this is what Obama thinks is a transparent organization and Presidency, I would hate to see what he considers a secretive and deceptive Presidency.

2) Over the past two days, we spent a lot of time reviewing the putrid economic trends in this country that have occurred under Obama’s administration and in conjunction with the current Congress. Low wage growth, stagnant household earnings, anemic overall economic growth, record number of adults without a full time job, high unemployment among African-Americans, etc. 

These horrible economic results have happened despite the fact that Washington had three major economic tailwinds at its disposal: an $800 billion economic stimulus package, an energy revolution that substantially reduced energy costs, and a Federal Reserve that injected trillions of fake dollars into the economy. And despite these major economic aids, Obama and the rest of Washington still screwed things up. 

Yesterday, we presented four solutions to this anemic economic situation. But R. Williams, writing for Moneynews on September 18, 2015 may have identifiedthe major reason why Washington has led us down this horrible economic path: a recent study now finds that the U.S. has slipped to a depressing 16th place in the world when it comes to economic freedom.

The study uses broad indicators of economic freedoms and is done on an annual basis by Robert A. Lawson of Southern Methodist University, James Gwartney of Florida State University and Joshua Hall of West Virginia University. In 2000, the U.S. was second in the world relative to economic freedom, trailing only Hong Kong. But the latest iteration of the study shows that citizens in countries like Singapore, United Arab Emirates and get this, the former SOVIET republic of Georgia, have greater economic liberties than Americans.

The reasons for this depressing drop from second to 16th is a result of the Federal government enacting more and more regulations and that legal protections for individuals have weakened: “The United States has experienced a significant move away from rule of law and toward a highly regulated, politicized and heavily policed state,” according to Larsen. “During the past decade, non-tariff trade barriers, restrictions on foreign investment and business regulations of various kinds have grown extensively.”

Other countries ranked higher than America in 2015 include the ones listed above plus New Zealand, Switzerland, Jordan, Ireland and Qatar. So now we see that not only is economic freedom better than the U.S. in a previous Soviet Republic but two countries in the oppressive Middle East, Jordan and Qatar, are also ranked higher. 

Thus, we now have a set of numbers and professional analysis that proves what we discussed yesterday: the more government gets involved in the economy, the more unneeded regulations are implemented, the more that economically ignorant politicians involved themselves with the market and economy, the worst the economic outcome is for Americans. The trend over the past fifteen years proves that doing exactly the opposite of what Obama has done in the past six years was the better economic remedy for the country.

But this should not surprise us. In many past political class insanity posts we have proven that usually when politicians get involved with a problem, they almost never resolve it, the often make it worst, and they spend and waste trillions of dollars in the process. That is the insanity of the current set of American politicians.

More insanity tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

The Nonsense That Is Obamanomics

An Associated Press (AP) article yesterday reported on the self congratulations press conference that President Obama and Vice President Biden threw for themselves yesterday. They were almost giddy with their report on how their stimulus package of a year ago and saved the economy from the second Great Depression, how wonderful and full of foresight they were to have created the stimulus package and executed it so well. made me sick. Lawyers like Obama and Biden should never try to fool the American public and statisticians like myself when it comes to numbers.

First, lets lay out the numbers that are not in dispute and then do some math:

• The unemployment rates during the time of the Great Depression, the 1930s, averaged about 20% for the whole decade, having a maximum level of about 25% in 1933 and a minimum level of about 17% in 1936.
• The January, 2010 unemployment rate was 9.7%, equivalent to 14.8 million Americans being out of a job.
• Obama just signed a bill from the Democratically controlled Congress, a Congress that has been under Democrats' control for over three years, that raises the debt limit to just over $14 TRILLION.
• There are about 130 million U.S. households today.
• The United States has lost about 8.4 million jobs since December, 2007, a period when the Democrats were in control of Congress.
• The cost of the Obama stimulus program was $787 billion.
• The Obama administration is claiming that the stimulus plan has already saved or created two million jobs, and could save another 1.5 million before it is done.
• The average hourly wage in the United States in December, 2009 was $22.41 per hour, which translates into an annual wage of about $38,000.

Now let's do some math, under the doubtful suspicion that the jobs saved/created estimate of 3.5 million is valid and accurate:

• If we divide the cost of the program by the Obama job number we see that the average cost to create a job under this stimulus program was about a quarter of a million dollars. This is almost six times the rate an average working American would make in a year. Not a real efficient way to create employment gains.
• If the economy would have had 3.5 million fewer jobs without the stimulus package, then the unemployment rate would have been about 12%. Thus, maybe the stimulus package did not save us from the second Great Depression which had unemployment rates average around 20% and were much higher during the height of the Depression. Obama's claim in his press conference that he averted a depression is quite overblown ("One year later, it is largely thanks to the recovery act that a second depression is no longer a possibility.") I don't think so, much exaggeration here Mr. President.
• By raising the debt limit to over $14 TRILLION, that pain if spread evenly across the entire U.S. household base would put every American household on the hook for just under $108,000. Thus, his taking credit during his press conference for the $400 and $800 tax breaks from the stimulus program looks kind of meek, relative to the $100,000 in debt he and the political class, Democrats and Republicans, have loaded onto our backs over the years.

These are not good results but they are the most optimistic since we used Obama's numbers. However, as reported many times in this blog, this whole process of estimating jobs saved/created has been riddled with bad data and assumptions. Jobs have been counted multiple times in some instances, some jobs that already existed were counted, etc. Thus, from a historical and political perspective, a case could be made that the 3.5 million estimate is little more than wishful thinking. We have seen numerous times where government estimates of costs, schedules, and other things have been off by factors of many times. Just as a sanity check, let's assume, and it is a generous assumption, that the number of jobs saved/created is only 2.5 million. What happens to the math then:

• The cost to create/save a job gets even more ridiculous. The cost for each job is now $787 billion over 2.5 million or $315,000 per job. This 8.5 times the average annual wages of currently employed Americans. How inefficient is this process, regardless of whose number is used?
• If the program actually did save 2.5 million jobs, than without it the unemployment rate would have been 11.3%, hardly Depression level numbers.

The political class does not get it. The government cannot create jobs, it can only create work, paying for that work by taking money/wealth out of the economy today and in the future (via deficit spending and increasingly high amounts of debt), to create temporary work projects today. While it may feel good to hire construction workers to work on a bridge project with stimulus money, once that stimulus money is spent, those construction workers are out of work again. The work did not endure past the stimulus funding. And the money used to pay for that bridge project was taken out of the economy where it may have been spent more efficiently in other parts of the economy. Certainly expending hundreds of thousands of dollars per job creation is not an efficient way to run an economy.

The sad part about the bridge example is that the government did not even get that right. As reported previously, the Associated Press found that about half of the bridge projects undertaken with stimulus funds were not in need of any repair, they were perfectly safe and usable as they were. Thus, the use of stimulus funds was not only expensive per job but a lot of those jobs were used on totally useless projects according to the AP investigation.

Americans spending their wealth on products and services they need and desire is the only way to expand the economy and job base and begin restoring freedom to our everyday lives. Continually expanding the tax burden on us while inefficiently using and wasting those taxes on faulty government programs is the exact opposite of what is needed to fix the economy. The government needs to get out of the job creation business, find a way to get the sky rocketing deficits under control and reduce the tax burden on Americans as much as possible.

Visit our website at www.loathemygovernment.com to order an autographed copy of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government -Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class" and to sign up for the cause. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes And Noble.

Obamanomics and The Stimulus Plan - Part 1

Let's talk a little bit more today about what impact the President's stimulus plan has had on the economy. As you may recall from yesterday, the AP and the White House were in a little bit of a spitting match about what numbers were valid to use with the White House promising to produce newer, more accurate results by yesterday, which they did.

The new numbers claim that Obama's stimulus plan has created or saved almost 650,000 jobs according to a new AP article by Matt Apuzzo and Brett Blackledge. The White House obviously thinks this is great news but, as always. let's do a little math. If the stimulus plan did indeed create/save 650,0o0 jobs and we divide that estimate into the estimated amount of the stimulus plan that has already been spent, $180 billion or so (see yesterday's post for the details), then each job Obama claims to have created or saved was done at a cost of about $277,000 per job! There is no way we can get out of the recession with these kinds of programs if it needs over a quarter of a million dollars to create one job. And remember, the 650,000 estimate is Obama's number, not some sandbagged Republican number.

What is even worse, according to the AP article, the White House still has not gotten all the kinks out of the estimation process:

• Despite earlier identification of a double counting, the jobs saved claim from the Palm Beach County, Florida water department is still was doubled from an actual of 57 jobs to a reported 114 jobs.
• Some programs that got money from the stimulus package continued to use the money for pay raises and not job saving, incorrectly listing those who got only a raise as a job saved.
• According to the article, there are still dozens of instances where contractors posted the same number of jobs created or saved on different projects, which resulted in multiple counting of the same employees who were just working different projects.

Even worse, the greatest number of jobs created or saved were in state governments. These state government employees, while they most probably work very hard, do not contribute to the growth of the economy since their wages are paid for by taxing people in the private sector. So saving their jobs is just a distribution of existing wealth via taxation, not from the market or the economy getting larger.

Now, given that the economy has already shed 3 million jobs this year, the Obama supporters could claim that unemployment would be even worse if the stimulus plan had not been passed. Two problems with this line of reasoning. First, this approach was never going to work it if cost over $270,000 to create one job under Obama's plan. Second, and this the real fundamental problem that no one is addressing, government does not create jobs, the private market does. Free people earning and spending their wealth as they see fit is the most efficient, cost effective way to grow an economy. Politicians either do not recall, do not know, or choose to ignore the fact that government does not pay for anything. It merely takes wealth via taxation from some members of society, individuals and businesses, and redistributes it to other members of society including a cut for itself.

Thus, to say this plan using government money "created" a job is a bogus argument since the money used to create this job will not be used to create another job that was the result of the free market, it was just redirected by the political class. The more Obama uses government money to create these phantom jobs, the less jobs will be created in other sectors of the market where people would have spent the money they earned if it had not been forcibly taken under taxation.

Remember, it was the political class, including both Republicans and Democrats, that got us into this mess in the first place with lax oversight performance of the banking, financial, and housing markets. No member of the political class accurately predicted, along with their respective economists, the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression until it was way too late to do anything. What makes anyone think they can fix the very disaster they caused?

"Love My Country, Loathe My Government" addresses many of these issues, the most important of which calls for a major downsizing of government and the associated taxation so that free individuals can take more control of their financial and economic choices and in the process, create the new jobs and industries that government cannot do by redistributing wealth.

While the above is a common sense description of how the stimulus plan is doomed to failure, tomorrow we will discuss Obamanomics and The Stimulus Plan - Part 2. We will review a Reason Magazine article that asked credible, non-administration economists their opinions of the stimulus plan and hopefully, provide some more detailed explanations of why this and other types of stimulus programs never work, always waste money, inflate the national deficit, and delay the recovery.

Was This Porgram Necessary? Part 2

This follow up to government waste is based on a September 3, 2009 AP article that appeared on Earthlink news. It was an article on a statement by Vice President Joe Biden on how well the $787 billion stimulus package was working. You remember Joe, he was the candidate that proclaimed during last year's campaign the FDR went on TV when the stock market crashed in 1929 and reassured Americans that everything was going to be alright. Unfortunately, FDR was not President in 1929 and TV existed only in a lab. Thus, Joe has never had a lot of credibility with me which is why I relied on an external source for the facts in this post.

Mr. Biden "proclaimed success beyond expectations" relative to the stimulus results. However, the article had a differing opinion in many instances:

• Although 192 airports were targeted for stimulus money, a federal watchdog launched an investigation as to why 50 of these projects did not meet the grant criteria.
• Four of the airports have a history of mismanaging Federal grants according to the investigation.
• While there were 2,400 military construction projects from the stimulus, millions of dollars were lost because many of these projects were not subjected to competitive bids.
• Of the 2476 bridges that were to receive stimulus money, nearly half of them, 1,123 bridges, passed safety inspections with high marks that normally would not qualify for Federal money, i.e. they were in good shape, were not about to fall down as the Vice President claimed, and in no need for help. Unfortunately, these bridges will waste $1.2 billion according to the AP analysis.

So, according to the Vice President, projects that are wasteful because they were not competitively bid, projects that are unneeded because there is nothing wrong with the bridges, and projects that are wrongfully granted money because they do not meet the criteria are a "success beyond expectations." He sure has a funny definition of success.

As with yesterday, let's do some math:

• The stimulus will spend $787,000,000,000 which means the American taxpayer will have to fork over $787,000,000,000 of their hard earned money at some point in time to pay for it.
• A billion dollars is a lot of money. If you spent a thousand dollars a day from the day Christ was born, you still would not have spent a billion dollars. Thing about it, most of us could live quite comfortably on a thousand dollars a day, particularly hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
• Since there are about 130 million households in the United States, if the $787,000,000,000 had been spread out over each household, every family would have gotten a check for about $6,000 (as opposed to the tax break of only $400-$800 they actually got). Thus, rather than waste money on strong bridges, bad youth job training programs (see yesterday's post), stupid and inefficient rebate programs ("Cash For Clunkers"), wasteful military construction projects, bank bailouts, government agency bailouts (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and other useless expenditures, I contend that giving every family $6,000 would have immediately stimulated the economy. We would likely have seen car sales jump, home foreclosures slow, consumer expenditures increase creating youth job opportunities and whole bunch of good economic stuff happen in a free and efficient way. Hey, we as taxpayers are going to have to pay the bill for the stimulus, we should at least get the benefit.

Would You Like Fries With That Stimulus Package (because that is all it is worth)

Let's take a well deserved break from health care reform and talk about stimulus packages. There is actually talk around DC of having a second stimulus package. Is that a good idea? Me thinks not. In her Reason magazine (www.reason.com) article in the April, 2009 issue, "Stimulating Ourselves To Death", Veronique deRugy does an inventory of stimulus history and analysis:

1) In a published work in 1992, Christina Romer, chair of Obama' s Council of Economic Advisors, and David Romer examined New Deal stimulus spending during the Depression and concluded that stimulus spending did not play any role in ending the Depression.

2) Harvard economist, Robert Barro, in his 2008 book, "Macroeconomics: A Modern Approach" concluded that $1 of government spending in war time produces less than $1.00 ($.80) in GDP growth.

3) Stanford economist Bob Hall and Sand Hill Econometrics chief Susan Woodward found that government spending in wartime did not increase or decrease GDP, i.e. for every $1.00 spent a dollar in GDP resulted.

4) Japan spent over $840 billion in stimulus attempts to restart their economy in the 1990s. This resulted in a massive jump in their debt to GDP ratio, massive corruption scandals and no economic recovery.

5) The Bush administration passed two stimulus packages, one in 2001 and one in 2008. Both failed to stimulate anything.

6) Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation analyzed several studies and found that increases in government spending actually reduce the size of the GDP.

Ms. deRugy explains the numerous reasons why stimulus packages and government spending do not increase economic activity but the biggest reason they do not work is also the simplest reason: government cannot inject money into the economy without taking money out of the economy first. They can borrow the money or collect it with more taxes but there is no aggregate growth in market demand. All it is is a redistribution of current or future wealth by the political class who tend to spend these stimulus dollars for pet projects that satisfy their egos and reelection needs.

A final stimulus rebuttal comes from a recent Cato Institute publication (www.cato.org). It cites a January 9, 2009 Obama quote regarding the latest stimulus package, "There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy." Unfortunately, this was not quite a true statement (my gosh, a politician lied?). Cato surveyed many leading economists and found over a hundred that strongly disagreed with that statement, i.e. everybody did not agree. These in disagreement came from leading, major universities including the University of Chicago, Cornell, Northwestern, Columbia, Stanford, NYU, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, USC, UCLA, MIchigan, Ohio State, Auburn, Washington University, Johns Hopkins, University Of Delaware, Rutgers, FSU, University of Texas, and many more.

So, take the fries option because past and future stimulus programs will not get us much more than that.