The Mirage of Recovery
By Robin Smith · Aug. 3, 2015
The economic recovery after six years of Barack Obama’s leadership is an absolute fraud. But that’s the inevitable result of massive government spending, “transformational” legislation that has restructured our health care and lawless executive orders designed to open America’s southern border to a flood of under-educated illegal immigrants driving down wages. On top of that, there are the newly defined metrics to obscure the facts — remember the 2009 introduction of “save or create jobs” versus “create jobs” as an official measurement of labor markets. Either way, Obama’s economic malaise is difficult to ignore.
The noble law entitled “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” (ARRA) had the stated intent to provide fuel to the sputtering economic engine to move our nation’s economy out of the ditch following the crash of 2008. The law was subdivided into 47 different categories by the Congressional Budget Office, but this legislative beast was quickly nicknamed the “stimulus” to imply a solution and a positive outcome. According to the CBO, the stimulus actually cost $4.7 trillion since 2009 to fund “recovery” through what was promised to be “shovel-ready projects” and to “save or create three to four million jobs” by 2011.
On paper, economists declared that the end of the “Great Recession” occurred in June 2009. Families around America’s kitchen tables know otherwise, as they see rising prices on groceries, electricity and other consumables, paired with limited wage growth, government dictates ranging from mandatory health insurance to taxes on tanning beds, and their home values still below their appraised value in 2008. All of these realities of Main Street are ignored by the political wizards on the desperate Left attempting to rewrite the facts surrounding the worst “recovery” recorded over the last 70 years.
Investor’s Business Daily featured an editorial that offers the painful contrast of this recovery to 10 others dating back to the end of World War II: “[I]f Obama’s recovery had been merely average — that is, if it had kept pace with the average of the previous 10 — the nation’s economy would be $2.07 trillion bigger.” That translates into more than $17,000 per family that did not materialize into earned wealth.
Ouch.
Let’s award credit where it’s due — to the policies foisted upon the nation by Democrats in power in the White House and both chambers of the Congress during 2009 (the last Republican budget prior to Obama’s monarchy was FY2007). The early bolus of “stimulus” spending was nothing more than Blue-State payback with graft going to their favorite big-government money pits and pork projects.
The breakdown of the ARRA had hundreds of billions directed toward transportation and highway projects, the infamous “green” investments that yielded the scandalized Solyndras, and vague spending to the tune of $118 billion for “the vulnerable.” A second round of “stimulus” essentially extended the life of these programs of redistribution that seemed to routinely benefit one group of people: Democrat constituents like unions.
The “stealth stimulus” that propped up lending and financial institutions, as well as automobile manufacturers through bailouts at the cost of $3.9 trillion served as socialism at its finest, taking from those who earned to infuse life into failed institutions and businesses.
In 2015, we see the historically low rate of labor participation with the average length of unemployment at 28 weeks, a full month longer than the same month in 2009. The wealthiest 5% of households have seen their income increase, according to the U.S. Census Department with a simultaneous drop in income for the bottom 20% of earners.
Ask a lower- to middle-class family, and they’ll declare there is no recovery. Ask black workers whose unemployment rate in May was 10.2% versus total national unemployment at 5.5%, and they’ll let you know the recovery bypassed their home.
Whether through pure entitlements that incented the able-bodied to exit the workforce, corporate cronyism, or the poison feeding the malignancy of big government growth, Obama’s “stimulus” has proven to be a failure of socialistic wealth redistribution with market manipulations to benefit and “pick winners” at the expense of law-abiding, hard-working Americans.
The level of cynicism and anger justifiably felt by Americans is at its apex toward Democrats and even Republicans, who simply can’t seem to find the courage to voice full-throated solutions to the public that speak to hope, results and vision for a better America.
Lady Margaret Thatcher, speaking in frustration about the lack of courage in the arena of public service during her tenure, presciently described today’s American elected class when she declared, “When I’m out of politics, I’m going to run a business. It’ll be called rent-a-spine.” The invertebrate class that passes off as national leadership timidly addresses our abysmal economy with poll-tested themes and only promises tax reforms, health care innovations and policy that generates growth in the American economy. But they live in an affluent bubble.
Obama’s economy will be a laughing stock of history and deemed a failure. The critical unanswered question remains, “Has America’s economy been recalibrated to a new normal of scarcity rather than opportunity?” Quite a stimulating thought.
All This for .01 Degrees Celsius?
By Joe Bastardi · Aug. 3, 2015
As the president reveals his plan to reduce greenhouse gases to save us from an apocalyptic atmosphere, I wish to remind people of three things:
1.) The true hockey stick of the fossil fuel era: Global progress in total population, personal wealth and life expectancy.
This is truly amazing. To show how fossil fuels played a roll in expanding the global pie, there are many more people alive today living longer and enjoying a higher GDP. One has to wonder if someone against fossil fuels is simply anti-progress. Ironic since many in the camp of anthropogenic global warming like to label themselves “progressive.” They’re certainly anti-statistic given something like this staring them in the face.
2.) The geological time scale of temperatures versus CO2.
As much as I struggle, I can’t see the linkage. Maybe it’s like one of those books where you have to stare at it and cross your eyes to see the picture.
3.) EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy admitted that the steps being taken would only prevent .01 degrees Celsius of warming, but it was the example that counted for the rest of the world.
This in addition to the fact that, in 2011, she admitted she did not know how much CO2 was in the atmosphere. And its lines of evidence for this are provably false!
Given the facts, I can’t help but wonder: Did policymakers ever take Economics 101, or a course in how to read a chart?
When I see simple questions that can raise doubts, if not outright debunk all this, it’s like watching the opening from the old Twilight Zone Series: “You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!”
Five-year smoothed rates of carbon transfer from land to air (+) or from air to land (-) vs. time. Adapted from Tans (2009, Oceanography 22: 26-35).
The President's Clean Power Plan is Built Upon a Pack of Lies
By Craig Idso · Aug. 4, 2015
Today, President Obama unveiled his administration’s latest initiative to combat climate change, the Clean Power Plan. Authored and overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, the new program requires a national reduction in power plant carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 32 percent just a mere decade and a half from now. Such a mandate, in and of itself, is a Herculean task that can be debated as to whether or not it is even possible to accomplish, as forecasts from the Administration’s own Department of Energy indicate ever more energy will be needed in the years and decades ahead — a need that is unlikely to be met without expanding the production of energy from fossil fuel combustion.
In the days, weeks and months ahead a lively debate will likely ensue with regard to how the President’s new emission rule will be implemented, the amount of jobs it will create, the lives it purports to save, the plan’s reliability, affordability and flexibility, the virtues of expanding renewable energy sources, and — dare we state it — the racial implications for implementing (or not implementing) the new rule.
As important as these features and characteristics are, however, it is crucial to note that none of them truly matter. They are all distractions from where the real debate should be taking place: the reason why the plan is being implemented.
According to the President and his acolytes, the Clean Power Plan is necessary in order to “tackle the threat of climate change.” In their view, increasing CO2 emissions are leading humanity down a dangerous path of irreversible global warming and climate change. Carbon dioxide is a perilous “pollutant” that will wreak havoc on society and the environment unless the new emission rule is implemented.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is built upon a pack of lies. This I know because for the past two decades I have read and published reviews of literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers that show rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have little impact on global climate. These reviews, along with some of my own original research, are archived on the CO2Science website, www.co2science.org, as well as in the 2013 publication Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science. This massive collection of papers definitively refutes the narrative President Obama is attempting to sell America and the rest of the world; for there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about the planet’s current level of warmth, extreme weather events are not increasing, and the net impact of rising temperatures is to actually savehuman lives.
Furthermore, it is equally disingenuous of the President and his Administration to characterize CO2 as a “pollutant.” Carbon dioxide is a well-known aerial fertilizer, and many thousands of studies have proven the growth-enhancing, water-saving and stress-alleviating benefits it provides for the biosphere, which benefits were recently summarized in the 2014 publicationClimate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts.
The reality is that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations are stimulating the productivity of the entire biosphere, where despite all of the many real and imagined assaults on Earth’s vegetation that have occurred over the past several decades, including wildfires, disease, pest outbreaks, deforestation, and climatic changes in temperature and precipitation, as shown in the figure below, the terrestrial biosphere has become, in the mean, an increasingly greater sink for CO2-carbon, more than compensating for any of the negative effects these phenomena may have had on the global biosphere. Additionally, the direct monetary benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on global crop production have been estimated to have been a staggering $3.2 trillion over the period 1961-2011.
Five-year smoothed rates of carbon transfer from land to air (+) or from air to land (-) vs. time. Adapted from Tans (2009, Oceanography 22: 26-35).
The Obama Administration should be fully aware of all of these truths. Copies of both Climate Change Reconsidered publications have been submitted to the EPA and other government agency officials over the years in one form or another. Sadly, however, rather than acknowledging these verities, the Administration has been hell-bent on disregarding them. This is where the real story lies and where the debate should be centered; for how in the world can a substance so beneficial and essential to life on Earth be so incorrectly demonized and regulated as a pollutant when literally thousands of scientific measurements and observations indicate otherwise?
Clearly, the people behind these actions care little for the truth, little for fossil fuels, little for affordable energy and little for the millions of unfortunate people who will suffer the negative consequences of the President’s misguided plan.
Originally published at co2cience.org on August 3. Dr. Craig D. Idso is Chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
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