Written by Taylor Stone

Welcome to the “Land of the Free” where the headlines are bad and the bombast from President Obama is even worse. Lets take a glance back to 2009 where for the first time in American history, government spending is going to increase job growth. It’s going to work this time.

Pay no attention to the history of past recessions, to how the economy has naturally rebounded itself without a stimulus package promising to reduce unemployment, because if something isn’t broken, you try to fix it anyways, right?

In 2009, Obama proposed a stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, with its top priority being to preserve at least three billion jobs in the following two years. It was a plan to create jobs short-term and to act as a catalyst for economic growth in the long term.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has produced data showing that it isn’t just a coincidence that the unemployment rate has increased under a plan that so fervently promised a large reduction in unemployment in a short amount of time.

Actual unemployment has far exceeded the assumptions of the White House showing that the unemployment rate would be lower than it is today if Congress hadn’t passed the stimulus.

When Obama proposed the stimulus package, he promised that unemployment would not fall below five percent. This is obviously not how things have played out; if any conditions are to improve, the hand of government needs to be drastically receded from our lives. As a country, it is not meant for us to be solely dependent on government to “fix” things.

At a glance, it looks like things are improving in the labor market; because conditions of the Great Recession are finally improving the reality of the situation is much less comforting. The reason unemployment seems to have decreased is because nearly 300,000 workers left the labor force, not because conditions miraculously changed. Hundreds of thousands of latent workers simply stopped looking for work.

If extreme government spending for the sake of digging the country out of a recession would stop, that void would be filled by a growing economy.

Take a look at history– take a look at the former presidents who did nothing and wisely let the economy rebound on its own. Under President Harding in 1921, the unemployment rate was at 11.7, and in just a year it decreased by almost half because of reduced government spending.

Is it a mere coincidence that the economy has rebounded on its own for, 150 years but now, under President Obama, recovery is feigned as a statistical mirage? Lets leave the ignorance at home and impose a plan that truly stimulates the economy, a plan that has worked since the beginning, a plan that will decrease unemployment instead of pretending to do so.