Brainiac Biden "Misreads" Economy

Brainiac Joe Biden, who apparently managed to get through his trip to Iraq without taking a big bite of his own shoe leather, claimed today that The Messiah's team didn't do very well in figuring out how bad the economy is:

Vice President Biden acknowledged today that the administration underestimated the depth of the economic recession months ago as it prepared a recovery package that is only now beginning to take effect.

"We misread how bad the economy was, but we are now only about 120 days into the recovery package," Biden said on ABC's "This Week." "The truth of the matter was, no one anticipated, no one expected that that recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having distributed the bulk of the money."

As usual, Biden has it wrong. What the Administration of the Anointed One actually did was to fail to realize that government spending never stimulates the economy. What it does - and this is a provable fact -- is take money out of the economy that could otherwise be used in the private sector to actually stimulate the economy. For example, how has all the money the government poured into GM and Chrysler stimulated anything? We were told at the time Bush did the first auto bailout that it was absolutely essential to bail out the auto companies so they could avoid bankruptcy. We couldn't let them go into bankruptcy, they whined, because thousands of jobs would be lost. Just like us rational folk predicted, they went into bankruptcy anyway and thousands of jobs were lost. Now the companies are emerging from bankruptcy, one as a ward of the state and the union that helped run it into the ground and the other was basically given to a European automaker that is known in the U.S. for building crappy cars that weren't competitive in this market. Their advertising budgets and dealer networks have been slashed. Some dealers that were making money were forced to close their doors or the franchises were "redistributed" to other dealers. GM's CEO was fired at the behest of The Messiah. So we've hobbled two large automakers, rendered them less competitive than they were, and put them under the thumb of a socialist administration. And Biden claims they couldn't foresee that antics like this would slow economic growth. He must really be as dumb as I think he is.

Biden also acts like before they came along none of this was tried. Wrong again. We've been pissing money down a rat hole now for over a year -- first with the $145 billion in money we didn't have distributed to people who didn't really need it and didn't spend it to stimulate the economy. Then, we had Bush's $700 billion, then Obama's $800 billion not counting the money going out the back door of the U.S. Treasury right and left. On top of this, Obama has created instability in the investment markets by turning bankruptcy law on its head. Investors don't know if the sector they are investing in will be the next one to be molested by Obama who will vacate their claim to recoup as much of their investment as possible as he did the preferred stockholders in the Big Two bankruptcies, screwing a lot of middle-class pensioners in the process. How can an economy recover with all of this economic policy recklessness?

History has shown that the average length of the 16 recessions in the last 100 years has been 13 months and we have history to show that massive government spending prolongs recessions and even turns them into depressions. The recession in the early 30s was turned into a depression by FDR's massive government spending and didn't even begin to turn around until the WWII military build-up kicked in. We've been in recession now for well over a year. Let's hope all this outrageous government spending and the economic uncertainty caused by cap and tax, tax hikes, universal health care and “employee free choice” piled on don't turn this prolonged recession into a yet another depression that Biden and the rest of the Obama Brain Trust “misread”.