There is nothing worse than people trying to be elected to office on 'talking points' rather than facts. The Obama Administration didn't grow government with its last budget, it returned it to function. That is a huge difference than 'Big Government.'
A good deal of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act went to 'stabilizing' the slide into the burgeoning insult on American sovereignty. Did anyone ever stop to realize that if there was no 'Stimulus' where the USA would be? Did anyone ever stop to realize there would be no USA? Quite possibly?
Oh, the Republicans were going to shrink government, they were going to shrink it so much the 'integrity' of what would be left wouldn't matter.
What absolutely astounds me is that during the entire process of hearing about the collapse and reacting to it and then passing the Bailout of $700 billion never once was the sovereignty of the USA even mentioned. Never once did the impact of the collapse take on the dynamics of 'real concern' as to what the citizens would do in the face of complete and abject loss of everything they ever had in life including their country's ability to function.
It wasn't until the Obama Administration took over and the majority Democratic Congress passed the ARRA did anyone give a damn about the integrity of the country, its citizens and how we were going to BEGIN to get out of this mess.
And what about the jobs that were saved, the relief for the States, the new jobs created, the intact nature of our governments and the fact we STILL have a future as a country and a democracy. That doesn't matter? That is taken for granted? Really?
...Although CBO has examined data on output and employment during the period since ARRA’s enactment, those data are not as helpful in determining ARRA’s economic effects as might be supposed because isolating the effects would require knowing what path the economy would have taken in the absence of the law. Because that path cannot be observed, the new data add only limited information about ARRA’s impact....
...•Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent,
•Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points,
•Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million, and
•Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)...
