Say Anything Blog

I was looking over Obama’s breakdown of the “stimulus” spending spree he just signed into law at Recovery.gov, and noted with interest that the breakdown of the spending had tax relief (with an asterisk next to it) as the biggest chunk:

Now, I know that Obama’s stimulus was more spending than tax relief so I clicked on the “learn more” link and was presented with a bunch of different-sized floating balls intended to represent the various aspects of the stimulus, and then this footnote in fine print explaining the asterisk:

* Tax Relief - includes $15 B for Infrastructure and Science, $61 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $25 B for Education and Training and $22 B for Energy, so total funds are $126 B for Infrastructure and Science, $142 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $78 B for Education and Training, and $65 B for Energy.

You’ll notice that “Infrastructure and Science” and “Protecting the Vulnerable” are all categories that are already named separately from tax relief.  Meaning that in order to inflate the tax relief total of the bar chart to make it look like the “stimulus” was more about cutting taxes than spending, Obama and his people just re-categorized spending from other categories and called it “tax relief.”

Neat trick, that.  I guess when Obama says things like “hope” and “change” and “new politics” and “accountability” he means “I’ll just pretend terms like “tax relief” mean whatever the hell I want them to mean.”