Barack Obama claims he has presided over trillions of dollars in spending cuts. If he’s a fiscal conservative, then I’m a forward “enforcer” for an NBA playoff team.
The president, who has increased the national debt by $5 trillion – more than all previous presidents combined – points to a nutty study by a journalist named Rex Nutting, whose virtual math asserts that Mr. Obama is an advocate for small government.
Mr. Obama has unrolled this meme on the campaign trail. He told a crowd at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on Thursday that the Republican plan to extend the George W. Bush tax cuts is “like trying to put out a prairie fire with some gasoline.”
Mr. Obama also pushed his green energy agenda by promising to save jobs at a wind-turbine factory in Newton, Iowa, where he said, “If Congress doesn’t act, companies like this one will take a hit. Jobs will be lost.”
Mr. Obama should know about lost jobs. Real unemployment, which includes underemployment and those who have given up looking, is about 11 percent. First Solar, to which the administration provided $3 billion in loan guarantees, has fired 30 percent of its workforce, according to Bloomberg Business Week. Abound Solar, which got a $400 million loan guarantee, stopped production in February and laid off 180 employees, according to Forbes. Solyndra and several other companies that received hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in loan guarantees also have gone belly-up.
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