Remember those $400.00 and $800.00 tax credits Barack Obama gave you in his stimulus plan? And remember that $250.00 gift he gave social security recipients?

Well, Obama decided he wants them back. Yep. According to the IRS, Obama has never asked for an adjustment of the tax tables, so millions of Americans are going to get taxed for having received the tax credits back in February — typically through adjustments the federal government demanded businesses make in employees’ withholdings.

“While implementing a credit through reduced withholding is an effective way to provide economic stimulus evenly throughout the year, it is difficult to account for everyone’s circumstances,” said J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. “More than 10 percent of all taxpayers who file individual tax returns for 2009 could owe additional taxes.”

The tax credit is also available for 2010. Russell said the problems will continue in 2010 if they are not resolved.

There are not 75. Hey, everyone else is looking up their state, so I might as well do so, too.

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Wow. Obama has been touring the nation making sure we know how many jobs he has saved or created. It is looking more and more like he is saving or creating the jobless.

Unemployment this morning topped 10.2%, even though the number seeking employment has declined. Many have just given up. Likewise, and more troublesome, the average hours worked in a week is at its lowest in decades — 33 hours. That suggests employers are going to just expand hours worked in the future, instead of hiring new people. So the unemployment number will stay high for a while.

On January 18, 2009, Obama’s top economics advisor Larry Summers said Barack Obama’s stimulus plan would keep unemployment below 10%.

On July 17, 2009, Larry Summers said

“Both administration and independent forecasts predicted that only a very small part of the total job creation expected from the Recovery Act would take place within six months,” he continued. “Indeed, a Council of Economic Advisers’ study predicted that only 10 percent of the total job impact of the Recovery Act would take place during calendar year 2009. Given lags in spending and hiring, the peak impact of the stimulus on jobs was expected not to be achieved until the end of 2010.”

In other words, an ever growing number of Americans have to sit on the unemployment line until next year by design. Why? So in 2010, Barack Obama and the Democrats can run on falling unemployment. They’d rather you starve now so they can have recovery happen in an election year.

We’re all political pawns to Barack Obama.

One more thing: remember, outside economists say passing the Democrats’ health care plan will slow the recovery further, stagnate wages, and increase unemployment. Do we want to do that?

God bless Georgia activists.

Someone “defaced” one of those “Paid for by the American Stimulus B.S.” signs that the feds are requiring be put up, two a piece, at each stimulus funded road project.

How was it defaced?

By plastering a copy of the 10th Amendment to it.

Check it out.

Congratulations RedState readers.

We have supported a small business, made a statement, and attracted the attention of the Wall Street Journal.

Since last Wednesday morning, Ron’s Home & Hardware has received roughly 240 orders for five-pound bags of rock salt. While buyers were scattered around the country, each requested the same delivery address in Portland, Maine – one of six state offices for U.S. Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe.

John M. Thieling, co-founder of the Indianapolis-based company, says an employee turned to the Web for an explanation and found a blog entry on RedState.com urging readers to order bags of rock salt from Amazon.com and mail them to the senator’s office. Ron’s Home & Hardware sells rock salt through Amazon.

Very well done!

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the government watchdog which oversees how the stimulus monies are spent reports contractors who received money from President Obama’s failed $787 billion stimulus program created or saved 30,383 jobs by the beginning of October.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this report covers only spending on infrastructure and social programs being carried out by private companies, which were awarded about $16 billion in stimulus funds. That amounts to $526,610 per job created or saved.

Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers claims the stimulus and “other policy actions caused employment in August to be slightly more than one million jobs higher than it otherwise would have been.”

I can’t wait to hear the CEA’s Obama-speak explanation as to how the contractors’ measly 30,383 jobs supports the council’s million plus estimate.

While the cognoscenti of the Western financial world is attempting to spin the recent fall in the dollar as a stylish financial mystery play with a journalist based in the Middle East as its star, the Whodunit spin is a red herring: the facts are that the dollar is weak, and getting weaker.

The world is awash in dollars. There is a massive oversupply. We are electronically creating (printing in another era) hundreds of billions of dollars to buy our own T-Bills. Our deficit and spending has soared.

Kudlow, in his column, “Save the Greenback, Mr. President” explains that solution is to remove the excess dollars from the market and to stop “printing so much debt:”

for therapy, the Fed should begin moving excess cash from the economy….And they need to stop printing so much debt from Congress. All this massive spending and borrowing is killing us.

Instead, the Democrats in Congress and the White House are planning more spending: a second spending bill is on the table — ironically tagged as the second stimulus bill, which ought to stimulate the dollar tanking — and of course, President Obama’s $1 trillion health care spending boondoggle.

When town hall meetings are interrupted with shouts of “stop printing money” the jig is up. Note to the White House: in the age of the internet, you cannot hide printing $600 Billion a year from the world.

Until the Federal Reserve stops printing money to buy our own T-Bills, and the Democrats in Congress stop spending on new programs and we lower our deficit the dollar will continue to drop. End of story, no other outcome is possible.

Simply put, the Dems are killing the dollar.

The Washington Post, alas, gets this editorial wrong in the very first sentence:

NO ONE LIKES to be the bearer of bad news — especially when it could threaten your multibillion-dollar health-care reform bill.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: considering the amount of time that the Right’s bloggers, pundits, and legislators have spent explaining why the Democrats in Congress needed to institute a Stop spending money we don’t have, you idiots policy, well.  We do live here, too, so our liking is hardly unalloyed - but we did say that this wasn’t going to work*.  Moving on:

And so the Obama administration did not exactly rush to publish yesterday’s required mid-session update to its federal budget estimates of last February. Still, once the numbers finally emerged in the dog days of August, they retained the power to stun: Instead of a cumulative $7.1 trillion deficit over the next decade, the White House now projects a $9 trillion deficit. These figures imply average annual budget deficits greater than 4 percent of gross domestic product through fiscal 2019, a rate of debt accumulation faster than projected GDP growth. This is not a sustainable fiscal path.

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At some point this August (or later), you might hear somebody ask you - probably with at least a sniff in their voice; possibly with an outright sneer - why it is that all of a sudden conservatives/Republicans now are worried about deficits. What were we, asleep?

Not particularly, of course - nonetheless, I think that this (alas, anonymous) comment about the Columbus Tea Party (H/T: Instapundit) pretty much covers the specific objection:

They might have been asleep for the last 8 years, but when you triple the national debt in 6 months with political handouts, calling it stimulus, it tends to wake people up.

Use of this Heritage graphic optional, but probably satisfying:

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

If the White House “misread” our entire economy back in January, should we trust it to read—and manipulate—even a fraction of the economy now? Logic says no. Yet, the health care industry makes up approximately one sixth of the entire U.S. economy, and many Washington Democrats are rushing to redesign it in the next week.

Think it won’t happen? Let’s take a trip down memory lane…

The push to pass the stimulus bill was frenzied and hasty. Over $787 billion was spent before you could say “shovel-ready.”

Fast forward six months.

Unemployment has climbed to nearly 10% as stories of wasteful stimulus projects are repeated on a daily basis. Whether it’s putting skylights in a state alcohol warehouse in Montana or buying a dishwasher in Colorado with money meant for meals, stimulus dollars seem to be going towards everything except creating jobs.

Now, with only a single week to go before the August break, the CBO is estimating that despite the cost-cutting rhetoric, the House Democrats’ health care proposal will increase America’s deficit by $239 billion over the next ten years. $239 billion is an awfully large increase for health care reform that was supposed to “save” money. It’s also a lot of money to spend by next week.

Americans are all wondering how they are going to afford their health care in their budgets. Shouldn’t Congress?

It is time for liberal lawmakers to learn from their mistakes and think through their health care reform proposal before it’s rushed to the floor for a vote. Last time Washington panicked and overspent, the American people didn’t get the economic recovery they paid for. Are we going to get the health care we pay for? The answer will be “no” unless Americans speak out and make their voices heard in the halls of Congress.

That’s House Minority Leader John Boehner’s response to CoS Rahm Emanuel’s rather… well, sad… statement that the White House has turned the economy around:

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In an attempt to defend the trillion-dollar health care overhaul bills currently being marked up in Congress, and to shift attention from his own actions to those of his predecessor, President Barack Obama (D-IL) declared in his July 18 radio address that “The same folks who controlled the White House and Congress for the past eight years as we ran up record deficits will argue — believe it or not — that health reform will lead to record deficits. That’s simply not true.”

Leave aside for the moment the fact that any deficit-spending records set in “the past eight years” were wiped out by Obama himself within a single month of taking office, and that the President’s ire was misdirected (it was the director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, who made that indictment of the health overhaul bills currently in Congress).The fact is, Obama’s claim to suddenly care about deficit spending at all is belied by his actions and his administration’s statements on a range of issues, from nationalized health care to the so-called “stimulus” package.

In that radio address, Obama urged legislators to “seize this opportunity – one we might not have again for generations – and finally pass health insurance reform this year.” He issued what was intended to sound like a warning along with that plea, saying, “I want to be very clear [that] I will not sign on to any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade.”

While this statement was carefully worded to sound to the American people like an admonition to legislators against producing a health care overhaul bill that isn’t revenue-neutral, the phrase “deficits over the next decade” is a direct reference to the recommended “Pay-As-You-Go” (or “PayGo”) policy Obama asked Congress to pass in June.

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For Congressional Democrats, it never rains, but it pours. If they thought their votes for the ’stimulus’ bill might look better with time, the White House has some bad news.

National Journal has posted a transcript of its interview with ’stimulus’ overseer Earl Devaney. If you opposed porkulus, the interview is as frustrating and entertaining as you’d expect. If you voted for it, you might want to brush up that resume and look for new opportunities:

NJ: Tell us about how you came into this job and what it is.

Devaney: …The other mission is sort of less intuitive, and it is quite a mystery to me why Congress would think the building of the government’s largest Web site ever would be something that 12 IGs could do. I think at the end of the day, they said to themselves, what group of people would be more guaranteed of getting the data up — good, bad or ugly, whatever it is — up on this Web site.

So, right now, we have a Web site up and running. We don’t envision what is up there now, which we call 1.0, is what the act envisions. Nor is it something that I’m particularly proud of…

NJ: Isn’t transparency sometimes dangerous to those in power?

Devaney: I think politicians have got their heads around the good sides of transparency. What they haven’t got their minds around is the downside of transparency. Come October 11, there are going to be things up on that Web site that embarrass people, clearly. I don’t think it is one party or the other. Everyone is going to be embarrassed to some extent.

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President Obama told the American people in January that the stimulus would work immediately in his sales pitch to Congress. Now that it’s failed to produce jobs — and the 9.5% unemployment rate is worse than the administration’s projections — Obama is changing his talking points. This is how you lose credibility, Mr. President.

Anyone who remembers, say, his campaign pronouncement that a Kansas tornado had left “ten thousand dead” and “an entire town destroyed” (the 2007 storm actually killed twelve people) knows that President Barack Obama (D-IL) hasn’t been one to worry about playing fast and loose with a few facts or numbers.

However, his dogged refusal to deviate from his standard talking point of “150,000 jobs created or saved” by the $787,000,000,000.00 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the “stimulus package,” or, my personal favorite, “Porkulus”) is beginning to lend itself to more than a little head-scratching by observers.

A Claim Unchanged by Time

Mr. Obama and his administration have been making the claim for several weeks now. On May 27, “White House economic advisers” announced the “stimulus” had “created or saved 150,000 jobs” since its inception 100 days before — an average increase (or savings) of about 1,500 jobs a day. Twelve days later, on June 8, Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE) made the same proclamation on a conference call with reporters: the stimulus had “saved or created 150,000 [jobs]” to date.

Theoretically, there should have been about 18,000 more jobs than that, given the twelve day interval between the May 27 announcement and the June 8 call, but never mind that. Just for good measure, despite the fact economists and simple observers who had the virtue of being awake alike were throwing up their hands in disbelief that a presidential administration would actually make such a claim about something as obviously incalculable as a “saved” job, Biden added the assertion that there had been “no ‘reasonable’ challenges to the estimates.”

Last Wednesday, July 8 — a full 30 days after the Biden conference call, and 42 after the initial 100 day claim of “150,000 jobs created or saved,” Mr. Obama’s deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget announced the “stimulus” had — you guessed it! — “created or saved 150,000 jobs since its inception in February.”

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Of his Social Security program, Franklin D. Roosevelt once said that the whole thing had nothing to do with helping the aged. “They were politics all the way through,” he said of his Social Security payroll withholding taxes. In other words, the So. Sec. program was created solely to give the Democrat Party a permanent majority on the “we care” ticket. FDR knew from the get-go that the program was an unsustainable sham but it was all about politics, not old people anyway.

Seventy some years later Barack Obama was praised as a second coming of FDR when he ran for office. His promises of everything for everyone were hailed as a second new deal. As we all know the economy took a dive at the tail of 2008, it continued apace into 2009 and once Obama took office he campaigned hard for a “stimulus” plan to lift America from its economic doldrums. It was an “emergency” he said, we couldn’t get by without it, he claimed. He cared about all of America, you see, and he, the great father in Washington, had the cure for what ails us. The great god of D.C. loved all his children we were sonorously informed.

Well, maybe not all. You see, just as FDR’s “help” only went to further his own political goals and not the country’s economic recovery, Barack Obama’s benevolence seems to have benefited mostly those that voted for him.

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…it’s who you know.  Isn’t that right, Governor Bill Ritter (D-CO)?

Gov. Ritter Steered Stimulus Money To Ex-Employer

DENVER (AP) ? Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter has awarded some of the state’s first stimulus money to his former employer in a no-bid contract.

Ritter hired his former law firm, the Washington-based Hogan & Hartson, in a no-bid contract to review stimulus spending, The Denver Post reported Friday. It said the firm was paid $40,000 in stimulus money through June.

In this case, ‘who’ is a law firm full of political donors of Governor Ritter’s (D), including at least two “who work directly on the state’s stimulus issues.”  The Governor’s (D) office is claiming that the deal was righteous, as well as legal… although they didn’t go into explaining why they paid six times what they would have if they had run things through the Attorney General’s office:

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Jobs are being lost everyday, the deficit continues to explode and the American people are angry.

It’s now been six months since President Obama moved into the White House and in that short time, we have seen all his economic policies fall flat on their face. The unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 9.5%, and the stimulus package has been defined by delays, fraud, and poor management.

Every day, I talk to Americans who are terrified about the path the country is going – the spending, the borrowing, the government intervention. That’s why we have introduced a bill that attempts to save the country from economic and fiscal disaster. It’s called the “Reducing Barack Obama’s Unsustainable Deficit Act” and it makes a much needed turn in the direction of fiscal responsibility.

On May 14th of this year, the President said, “The long-term deficit and debt that we have accumulated is unsustainable. We can’t keep on just borrowing from China, or borrowing from other countries…At some point they’re just going to get tired of buying our debt.”

While true, I think the American people are also getting tired of buying the President’s empty rhetoric.

To actually match word to deed, we have offered legislation to give Americans their money back. The first step is to cancel the spending portion of the stimulus package and recall the $460 billion that has not yet been spent. The money hasn’t gone out the door and we can still get it back.

The second step is to reclaim all unobligated TARP money so none of the remaining $150 billion can be wasted. The legislation then requires that all TARP money paid back must go directly to paying down the debt.

This simple measure will save taxpayers billions and help reduce this year’s projected $1.85 trillion deficit – by far the largest in U.S. history!

A lot of folks out there are saying they want their ‘change’ back, but the truth is Obama’s into us for a lot more than pocket change. And it’s clear buyer’s remorse has set in across this country. I, for one, think it’s time we get our money back.

When President Obama selected Rahm Emanuel to serve as White House Chief of Staff, most commentators hailed it as a coup. We were told that Rahm was brilliant, and that his love for brass-knuckles politics would prove invaluable in moving the president’s agenda through Congress. As a veteran of the Clinton White House, he would be sure not to repeat the mistakes Clinton made early in 1993. And because Rahm had come from the House of Representatives, and had been DCCC chair when the Democrats won a majority in the House, scores of Democrats would listen to him. Love him or hate him, all were confident that Rahm would be effective.

Is it too early to ask if something went wrong?

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