With each passing day it becomes clearer how badly the Democrats’ $838 billion-plus stimulus has failed. But look who’s come to explain it away: a man known for his careless way with the facts.
With unemployment at 9.1% — well above the 8% the stimulus was supposed to prevent it from reaching — Bill Clinton told reporters on Tuesday that the problem with the massive Obama economic program was that “there just wasn’t enough of it.”
As Politico pointed out, the impeached former president has defended the stimulus before, telling Fox News in 2009 that it would keep “the states and local governments from laying off a million more people or having big tax increases” and “will create the jobs the president wants.”
Sadly forgotten is Clinton’s own proposed stimulus early in his first term. It’s laughable to recall that his $16 billion “jobs bill,” intended to give a quick boost to the economy, “had been an article of faith among the Clintonites,” as veteran Washington political reporter Elizabeth Drew described it in her book on the early Clinton presidency, “On the Edge.”
Republicans killed the Clinton stimulus after alerting the public to its “ready to go” provisions, which included “a beach parking lot in Fort Lauderdale and a cemetery in Puerto Rico, money for fish atlases and for student drawings of ‘significant structures’ for deposit in the Library of Congress,” as Drew noted.
Of course, the jobs bill’s failure to pass didn’t prevent Clinton from taking credit for the technology-driven expansion that occurred during his years in office, which had nothing to do with Clinton and everything to do with the seeds planted by the Reagan tax cuts.
But what about the Obama stimulus, which did become law? E.J. McMahon, senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute, exposes its true nature in a recent Encounter Books pamphlet titled “Obama and America’s Public Sector Plague.”….
“The biggest problem for the state is the enormous, recurring structural budget gap starting next year and into the future,” said E.J. McMahon of the conservative-leaning Empire Center. “Cuomo clearly hopes that starting in 2021, (Democratic presidential candidate Joseph) Biden and a Democratic Congress will provide states and local government a couple of year’s worth of added stimulus. Read More
Ed McKinley
ALBANY — When the New York Constitution was reorganized nearly 100 years ago to give the governor more power over the budget process, noted there was a risk of making “the governor a czar."
M Read More
Michael Gormley
ALBANY — A new study by a conservative think tank says President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law gave most New Yorkers a tax cut, even as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo insists on repealing the measure because he says it will cost New Yo Read More
Johan Sheridan
ALBANY, N.Y. () — The Empire Center filed a against the state Department of Health on Friday.
“This case isn’t about assigning blame or embarrassing political leaders,” said Bill Hammond, the Empire Center’s Read More
The Empire Center first reported Tuesday that grants — 226 of them, totaling $46 million, to recipients selected by the governor and individual state lawmakers — seemed to still be going ahead. Read More
With lingering questions about how the novel coronavirus killed thousands of New Yorkers who lived in nursing homes, a group of state lawmakers is pushing to create an independent commission to get answers from the state Department of Health. Read More
“The importance of discussing this and getting the true facts out is to understand what did and didn’t happen so we can learn from it in case this happens again,” Hammond said. Read More
No doubt, the Health Department and the governor would like this report to be the final word on the subject.
But if it’s all the same with them, we’d still like a truly independent review. Read More