Obama “stimulus” = Bush “stimulus”

Didn’t we have an election for “Change you can believe in”?

Obama’s first imperial press conference showed nothing is changing except the new prez is a smoother talker, not hard to do after 8 years of Bush’s tied tongue.

Obama sayeth:

What I won’t do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested and they have failed. And that’s part of what the election in November was all about. Okay?

Okay, okay, okay. We get it.

But what happened the last eight years? Bush blew $5 trillion on the Iraq War (not to mention all the dead Americans and Iraqis) and paid for it with inflation, deficits, and debt. To pacify upset voters, he went on the biggest domestic spending binge since LBJ.

What’s Obama doing? Continuing the Iraq War, escalating the Afghan War, conducting even more attacks on Pakistan, and spending even more wildly than Bush. And Obama isn’t ending the Bush inflation. (The decline in some prices in recent months is temporary, as people cut back spending and inventories piled up. Now inventories are clearing and prices are rising again — as you see at your gas pump — and soon will rise even faster.)

Bush also had two “stimulus” packages last year. Neither worked. Both made matters worse.

Bush tax increases = Obama tax increases

And as to taxes, Obama is just continuing Bush’s tax policies. Most of Bush’s tax cuts already were scheduled to expire in 2010. Call them the 2010 Bush tax increases. Obama is letting that happen.  So where’s the change?

Oh, and the impending tax increases are a big Sword of Damocles hanging over the U.S. economy right now. Persons and  businesses have no idea what tax levels will be imposed next year or in the following years.

Obama attacked Republicans for opposing his “stimulus.” Yet just a few months ago they supported both of Bush’s “stimulus” schemes. So it’s just partisanship — therefore irrelevant.

Cold turkey

Quoth Obama:

But at this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life.

The analogy is to a patient on a gurney in the ER with heart failure, being shocked back to life with those electric paddles. That’s the wrong analogy.

Rather, the economy has been on the heroin of wildly increasing government in recent years under Bush and needs to go cold turkey, withdrawing from the opiates of high taxes and high spending. It will be painful. But the alternative is more addiction, economic depression, and even more painful withdrawal symptoms later.

John Lennon got it right: