First, we got the massive bailouts and so-called stimulus plans. And the economy shrank, unemployment rose and companies continued to go out of business or become subsidiaries of the federal government. But Obama claims these are just more signs that his plan is… working?

Obama spoke Monday about “modest progress” in the economy, citing fewer jobs lost last month than expected. He said he hopes to build on that in the months ahead with stimulus programs.

Unemployment hit a 25-year high. Modest progress? General Motors declares bankruptcy. Modest progress? Trillions of debt piled up with nothing to show for it. Modest progress? Someone might want to check and see if Barry’s gotten back into the blow. But don’t ask the MSM to investigate… they’re too busy swooning over Obama’s BS.

[T]he inability to measure Mr. Obama’s jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one — not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics — actually measures “jobs saved.” As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama’s jobs claims are “based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs.” Nice work if you can get away with it.

And get away with it he has. However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula “save or create” allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion of precision.
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Mr. Obama’s comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and — presto! — you have the president claiming he has “saved or created” 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.

Even the administration, itself, is finally admitting the economic forecasts it used to sell the stimulus were BS.

By now, according to earlier White House economic models, the nation’s unemployment rate should be on the decline. The forecasts used to drum up support for the plan projected today’s unemployment would be about 8 percent. Instead, it sits at 9.4 percent, the highest in more than 25 years.

He’s been such a complete disaster for the economy, he’s actually restored trust in the Republicans to better handle the issue. Modest progress.

So now he’s shifting his focus to healthcare. Apparently he wants to wreck this system beyond repair as well. You know, leave a lasting legacy or something. And once again, he’s trotting out more unsupported claims and imaginary figures to ram a new economic disaster (healthcare) plan through the American landscape.

The main White House argument for health-care reform goes something like this: If we spend now on a hugely expensive new insurance program for the middle class, we can save later by reducing overall U.S. health spending. This “tastes great, less filling” theory could stand some scrutiny, not least because it is being used to rush through the greatest social spending program in American history.

What if this particular theory turns out to be a political illusion? What if the speculative cost savings never report for duty, while the federal balance sheet is still swamped with new social obligations that will be impossible to repeal? The only possible outcome will be the nationalization of U.S. health markets, which will mean that almost all care will be rationed by politics.

Just wait. Obamacare will be fast-tracked through Congress as a way to save the economy (but wasn’t that the intended result of the trillions in spending in bailouts and stimulus bills?) and when the plan turns out to be a complete failure and the economy is pushed further into the crapper, we’ll hear the administration talking about its overly-optimistic estimates and excuses about how they didn’t comprehend the true landscape before passage of the disaster.

Rinse and repeat. This is what you get when you put an inexperienced community organizer in control of the greatest nation on earth. But hey, at least he talks real good, right?