Surprise, Mitch McConnell Taking Credit For Jobs Created By Stimulus He Hates

Not that anyone will be knocked over with this particular feather, but let's give a little cheer to Mitch McConnell for this bit of chootspah:  

“Five years later, the stimulus is no success to celebrate,” said the embattled Republican to the Associated Press, “It is a tragedy to lament.”*

Of course, that tragic spending halted and reversed the economy's slide toward another Great Depression, but since it didn't immediately result in everyone getting rich, that detail can be ignored and we can write a nice obituary for Keynesian economics, and while we're at it maybe elect Mitt Romney because he would have let GM go bankrupt. Heck, maybe he could still do it, yay!

Also, too, Obamacare is a very bad thing because the government has no business interfering in your healthcare, except maybe when Mitch McConnell wants to run an ad calling attention to a helpful government health program he helped pass in the '90s, because it helps people.

Jamelle Bouie at the Daily Beast explains a bit:

If by “tragedy” McConnell means “a lifesaver for the American economy,” then he’s absolutely right. When Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, five years ago this month, the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month. By that spring, job losses had slowed to a halt, and by that summer, the economy was beginning to grow again.

Over the next three years, as Michael Grunwald explains for TIME, the stimulus would produce a 2 to 3 percent increase in GDP each quarter, prevent 5.3 million people from slipping below the poverty line, improve tens of thousands of miles of infrastructure, and provide tax cuts to 160 million Americans.

And of course, the stimulus also brought a bunch of awesome jobs to Kentucky, which Mitch McConnell was happy to brag about at the time, like these kind words he had for a stimulus-funded project to destroy chemical weapons stockpiles at the Bluegrass Army Depot:

"This is going to be a source of significant employment. At the peak, we could have up to 600 people working on this, and we believe the substantial majority of those workers will be Kentuckians."

Of course, government spending is always bad, except maybe when it's going to fighter planes that can't fly in the rain or other important military boondoggles. Government spending is so terrible, in fact, that while the private sector is adding jobs, unemployment rates are still fairly high because federal and state governments are still shedding workers.

And of course, Mitch thinks Obamacare is terrible, because government should not be involved in health care, ever, except when Mitch McConnell saves workers' lives by helping cancer patients through government programs for workers exposed to radiation:

Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, agrees that McConnell was the primary advocate for that program, which was also pushed by the Clinton administration.

On the other hand, he also fought against closing or "over-regulating" the plutonium plant where the nice guy in the ad worked. But the main thing to take away from this is that Mitch McConnell can do a better job of protecting your health than Obamacare. Just as long as you worked at that leaky plutonium plant in the '90s.

*Also, McConnell or an aide wrote it in a column for Reuters. 

[ Daily Beast / Time / WaPo ]

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