Boehner and the Stimulus
House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio released a press release on the one-year anniversary of the Stimulus Bill. In it he said:
“Today, fewer than one in 10 Americans believe the trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ has created jobs.”
That is important, folks. This was a press release, so he had time to craft his phrasing very carefully. And it shows. Notice, he didn’t say whether the stimulus had created jobs. Because in the real world, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that voters don’t believe that it has created jobs. Their perception is their reality, and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Now, of course, the stimulus hasn’t helped. It hasn’t. You can’t point to any given job and say; “This is a ‘stimulus’ job.” Not even the ones paid for by stimulus money, because all that stuff had to be done anyway. It doesn’t matter which checkbook their salary comes out of, those jobs would have existed anyway. All that money is fungible. The only thing the stimulus has done is to increase the national debt by shifting the cost of these inevitable jobs away from the efficient states and private businesses to the inefficient federal government. It’s sad, really. We could have been so stimulated, but now we’ll just be taxed.
Good Common Sense 
Well said. It is unfortunate that some folks even want more stimulus packages–they just don’t get it.