-By Warner Todd Huston
Congressman Paul Ryan (R, Wis) and former Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Holtz-Eakin came together early this week to lambaste Obama’s failed economic policies.
In a conference call to supporters and the press, CBO Director Holtz-Eakin said that there is “no evidence” that “the stimulus has really worked” and that Obama’s Keynesian fixes simply won’t work.
There is nothing about Keynesian stimulus that is going to fix those problems. The spending by the government has gotten worse, has not solved the housing problem, and has also not been successful. Instead, the key to more rapid economic growth is going to have to be the business sector and international trade.
Representative Ryan echoed that assessment, saying:
Take a look at what our government has done in the last two years trying to get this economy out of the recession. The 1.1 trillion dollar stimulus, which is what it is when you add the interest spending, has not worked. It has exacerbated our debt problems. The Keynesian experiment, which was more spending, has failed to produce … jobs, it didn’t bring our unemployment down below 8% as it is promised. We’re still hovering close to ten percent. We’re not producing the private sector jobs that we need to be if we want to get back to our pre-recession unemployment rate. We’d have to create 250,000 jobs a month for five years running and we’re not anywhere close to that. So why is that happening?
Ryan proclaimed the Obama Administration and Congress have failed miserably to shore up confidence in the U.S. economy. ryan said that the current direction that government is headed is in “the exact opposite direction it ought to be going.”
Ryan went on to note that with the tax hikes coming in January and another round of hikes due to come in 2013 are severely dampening economic growth as employers and the business community find themselves afraid to expand in the face of these tax hikes.
Ryan lamented that America is facing a “lost decade.” During the call, Ryan said, “We could have come out of this recession in a much more proper way if we had the right fiscal policies in place, if we had the right monetary policies in place. Unfortunately we don’t and this is why many people see that we can have our own lost decade.”
Unfortunately, Ryan said, we are piling a whole new regimen of entitlements in a “fiscal explosion that will give us a lost generation.”
Holtz-Eakin agrees saying that “debt and deficits as far as the eye can see” is dooming the U.S. to continued economic pain.
Earlier this year Representative Ryan introduced his “Roadmap for America’s Future” to highlight his ideas to bring the country out of the recession.
Rep. Ryan was on MSNBC’s Hardball earlier this month and did a great job explaining why these tax hikes are bad for the country.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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