Just caught this in Ed Morrissey’s piece on Vice President Joe Biden’s surprise floating of “the prospect of his succeeding President Barack Obama in the White House.” Biden, the 2010 CPAC Blogger of the year, quipped, “hasn’t exactly set the world on fire as a VP“:
He’s been put in charge of the Porkulus program, which turned into an expensive flop. Does anyone know what the unemployment rate should be now, according to the administration’s estimate if the stimulus package passed? 6.7%. Thanks to his months-long blather last year about “Recovery Summer,” no one takes Biden seriously any longer on economic matters.
Italics added. Bold in original. So, in order to push through an $800 billion spending plan, the administration promised us an unemployment rate of 6.7% — still higher than the average of the George W. Bush years. And we’re at 9% now, with the most recent report from the Conference Board showing leading economic indicators slipping.
No wonder no one takes Biden seriously on economic matters, with many having similar thoughts about his boss.
It still baffles me how the liberals roundly rejected Bigot as President, but thought being a VP was a brilliant idea.
Real unemployment is really 15-17%; this nonsense of the 9% unemployment takes in a factor of long time unemployed who are no longer counted. I’m sure the 2-3 million people who are no longer counted as unemployed really appreciate Obama’s shell games. This is a big problem for Obama & playing with the numbers will not help him in 2012.
Oh, as for Joe Biden, he’s an idiot. I hope he does run for POTUS again. It will be entertaining as everyone laughs at him.
High unemployment / non-recovery has been *caused* by Porkulus… and by other Obama policies (QE, general business-raping, etc.)… all the more reason it cannot be solved by them… I wish the GOP candidates would talk about that more aggressively.
That would require that they grow a pair, ILC, which doesn’t seem very likely.
Biden succeed Obama on 2018, is he delusional?
As for the GOP growing a pair…anyone have thoughts about Herman Cain. Yes I know he’s not for gay marriage, but fiscally he’s making some of the right noises.
I had hopes for Newt, but he’s just not up for it. And Pawlenty and Romney are hopelessly compromised.
Maybe Huntsman and/or Cain?
One of my great irritations with the whole range of unemployment stats is that they pay no attention whatsoever to many self-employed people who can not get enough work to make ends meet. I know many graphic artists who have lost “mainstay” clients who have simply stopped redesigning their advertising messages and have slashed their outlay for refreshening design.
I bring this up, because when the extra ingredients that set one enterprise apart from another are being cut, it means the belt tightening is so tight that the enterprise itself is struggling.
If Joe Biden were your average self-employed spokesman for a major enterprise, he would have be canned long ago. I wonder if he could pony up the near 16% tax for Social Security and Medicare while driving around town begging Denny’s to hire him to improve their image as a green, organic, lo-fat, healthy eating emporium?
This long running recession is hard on people who live by their wits. It must be hell on half-wits.
Yeah, I heard him being interviewed by Rusty Humphries one night about 2 months ago. Really liked what I heard and have been meaning to look into him. What I keep wondering is why he’s always (in the media) connected to Godfather’s Pizza, but never to the Fed Reserve Bank in Kansas City.
Does anyone take Biden seriously about anything? He makes me chuckle just looking at him and anticipating what’s going to come out of his mouth next.
As for the GOP (and this certainly goes for the Dems as well), they’re too entrenched to change. We need to a do-over and get rid of both parties and start again!
Biden in his salad days would squint and peer and come across as honing in on the topic. Now he squints and peers and comes across as a drunk being arrested and gearing up to to say something moronic.
Right. Had the stimulus been bigger (as virtually every credible economist was calling for at the time) and had it been less GOP-accommodating tax breaks in favor of more actual, you know, stimulus, the rate today would have been considerably lower. Had there been no stimulus at all, most of you would be standing in bread lines today.
Your ability to deny your own best interests in the name of ideology is amazing.
PeeJ’s ability to defy logic is amazing.
Hey PeeJ, if you’re accepting the projected numbers would have come true with a bigger porkulus.. aren’t you admitting that if we’d done nothing we’d be in better shape than we are now using the same numbers you’re arguing for a bigger spending plan?
Checkmate.
Only if, by “credible”, you mean “politically left-wing”. Oh wait, you would.
Exactly and totally wrong. Amazing that someone could pack so much stupidity and economic ignorance, into one sentence.
Peeing Jay reminds me of the two hobos talking about what to fix for breakfast: “If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.”
I am sure that every credible hobo would agree.
PJ, a bigger Porkulus would have made a bad problem even worse; the almost $1 trillion dollars have gone to Obama’s union cronies & only lasted a year or less; now they need more public money with the same problem as before. Porkulus is a waste since it took money out of the private sector to be used in the public sector. No jobs were created. And ones that were, were only temp jobs. Notice, Obama is not running on Porkulus for his re-election campaign, but he’s running on green energy & Amnesty 2.0 while unemployment remains high.
Obama said passing Porkulus would have kept unemployment at or below 8%; now unemployment is really 15-17% as Obama runs away. Typical coward.
Porkulus is also one of the reasons we have inflation. Thank you Obama; he’s the gift the keeps on giving if you like cow pies.