What does Obama's failed stimulus have to do with Winnie?

There is gloom enough to satisfy Eeyore. The president promised the country that his massive $787 billion stimulus package and other spending would reduce the unemployment rate to 8 percent; with the loss of 131,000 jobs in July, it is stuck on 9.5 percent, and would be higher still had more than one million workers not withdrawn entirely from the work force since April. That figure rises to 16.5 percent if we count the 8.5 million workers involuntarily working part time, and 2.6 million workers “marginally attached to the labour force,” which includes 1.2 million too discouraged to continue job-hunting.

So Barack Obama flits from auto factory to auto factory, television cameras in tow, dons safety glasses and argues that he has, really has, created jobs, especially for unionized workers. Next week, voter-hungry Democrats and the odd Republican senator will vote to spend another $26 billion to reverse the tide of layoffs by state and local governments (50,000 jobs cut in July) that prefer federal government handouts to more belt-tightening.

It must be frustrating for a politician who inherited an economy bleeding 700,000 jobs per month to watch his popularity plummet even though the economy actually added 71,000 private sector jobs last month, a figure dwarfed in voters’ views by the 131,000 total jobs lost. It seems that voters are thinking that for the more than a trillion dollars spent on various programs, they should have more to show for it than continued joblessness. Economist John Makin put it succinctly and well when he noted in his monthly outlook, “We do not have liftoff.”

Eeyore, from Winnie the Pooh