President Barack Obama went golfing on the five-year anniversary of his failed $831 billion stimulus bill.
GOP legislators slammed Obama and his policies as Obama hit the links Monday morning at the Sunnylands course, which is located beside Gerald Ford Drive, near Palm Springs, Calif. He went golfing with friends Bobby Titcomb, Greg Orme and Michael Ramos, according to a pool report.
“The percentage of Americans participating in the labor force is at the lowest level since Jimmy Carter occupied the White House as millions of discouraged job seekers have simply stopped looking for work,” said a statement from Sen. John Thune.
Speaker of the House John Boehner marked the day with contemptuous message to Obama. “The ‘stimulus’ has turned out to be a classic case of big promises and big spending with little results … millions of families are still asking ‘where are the jobs?'”
“More Americans are living at or below the poverty line … household incomes are down … [and] a new normal of slow growth has set in, with most now saying the worst is yet to come.”
Boehner’s staff also invented a talking ATM machine to ridicule the spending bill. “The Democrats who run Washington spent almost a trillion dollars on a “stimulus” that didn’t work … and they want to spend more! … You won’t catch me spending any of your money; I just want you to have it.”
Obama is not expected to defend the stimulus bill, which helped pump up government’s debt to $17 trillion and was dubbed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Obama will fly back to D.C. after a weekend campaign trip to California, where he played golf, held a quick summit with the embattled king of Jordan, and attended a meeting with Americans living in California’s government-regulated, drought-stricken farmlands. He’s flying out of Palm Spring at 2 p.m. and will land in D.C. at 9 p.m.
However, his communications aide, Dan Pfeiffer, tweeted out a defense of the president’s policies that have left 20 million Americans unemployed or underemployed. “GOP attacks on the Recovery Act are a perfect example of the delusional messaging that makes them appear out of touch to so many Americans,” said Pfeiffer.
Spokesman Jay Carney used a tweet to announced that “our businesses have added 8.5 million jobs since February 2010, including 2.4 million jobs added in 2013 alone.”
That’s 200,000 new jobs a month, for a working-age native and immigrant population that is rising at roughly 90,000 a month.
On Friday, Obama acknowledged the slow recovery after the 2008 collapse of the government-inflated real-estate bubble.
“While those at the top are doing better than ever, average wages have barely budged,” he declared in his Feb. 15 weekend address. “Too many Americans are working harder than ever just to get by, let alone get ahead,” he said, before offering a government-mandated minimum wage as a cure for his economic policies.
Republicans, however, offer an agenda to spur economic growth: “If the president and congressional Democrats are willing to work with Republicans, there is bipartisan action we could take today to actually help create jobs and economic opportunity, including approving the Keystone XL pipeline, enacting Trade Promotion Authority, and repealing the medical device tax,” said Thune.
