Poll: 62% of Americans say Obama’s stimulus created more debt

posted at 1:27 pm on December 9, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Fiscal Stimulus ]   

In his game-changing speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, on Tuesday, the president laid out his plan for recapturing fiscal solvency by creating economic equality. Obama introduced his novel approach using the “you tried the rest now try the best” argument popularized by pizzerias. About halfway through the speech, he derided trickle-down economics as

a simple theory—one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 50s and 60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.

In contrast to these “failed policies” are the president’s own solutions, which he has spoken of often. Included among them are “investing” in education, innovation (read: green energy), and infrastructure.

Listening to Obama, you might get the sense that he is running for the office of president—for the first time. He seems oblivious to the fact that under his stewardship we’ve been there and done that. Taxpayers ponied up $787 billion to pay for Obama’s American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and now have virtually nothing to show for it. In February, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office determined that each job created or “saved” by the Obama stimulus cost taxpayers $228,055. Earlier reports revealed that over $22 million in stimulus funds had been sent to dead people and that $2 billion in stimulus money had found its way into the pockets of some of the nation’s biggest polluters. So much for the adminstration’s green initiative.

Obama is clearly hoping that the electorate has a short memory, but a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll suggests otherwise. Among the poll’s findings are that 62% of Americans believe that the stimulus packages approved in recent years by Congress have added to the nation’s debt rather than helped the economy. Not surprisingly, the percentage of respondents who subscribe to this view varies along party lines, with 82% of Republicans and 63% of Independents sharing the view. More telling is the fact that 44% of Democrats also believe stimulus spending has hurt more than helped.

Respondents also state that the budget deficit will impact their vote. Again, 62% say a candidate’s efforts to reduce the budget deficit will be “very important” in their decision. Even if one accepts Obama’s premise that the solution to the economic crisis is to extract a pound of flesh from the wealthiest Americans, his approach, according to numbers crunched by Charles Krauthammer, would have reduced this year’s deficit from $1.30 trillion to $1.22 trillion. The differential is hardly an amount that is likely to jump-start the economy.

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