THE PRESIDENT PLAYS LIARS POKER WITH TAXPAYERS

In the game of Liars Poker. At the start of a hand, each player is given a unique eight digit serial number. The first person makes a bid, which is a guess as to how many of a certain digit is contained in the combination of all the serial numbers.
The bid will eventually get high enough where all other players will call the bidder a liar. When this happens, all serial numbers will be revealed, and the digits will be counted. If the bidders bid was untrue a point is rewarded.

Last night President made eight statements/promises that he said he would accomplish as a result of the Stimulus package and the other spending he plans to implement.
In a way he was playing a sort of game of sophisticated, semantic Liars poker with the American public.

The analogy may be tenuous for many, but try to follow me briefly.
Obama promised eight things that are either out right lies, or they are misstatements due to ignorance.
We cannot claim a Harvard educated lawyer who was editor of the Harvard Law Review is not intelligent, so we move to the point of bald face lies.
Lies that like the game of Liars Poker will not be determined for months, even years.

His first statement:""We have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and refinance their mortgages. It's a plan that won't help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values".
The truth is:If the administration has come up with a way to ensure money only goes to those who got in honest trouble, it hasn't said so.

The second prevarication is probably an instance where his speech writers ignored history, and he cannot be blamed, but here it is:
" "And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it".
The true fact:A German Karl Benz invented a four cylinder motor car long before Henry Ford made his in 1908.

The third:"We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before".
The Truth is we have reduced our crude oil imports from a high in 2005 of 5 billion barrels to a present 4.7 billion barrels!

The fourth lie: " "We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade".
The truth is that even if re-elected he will not be in office in 10 years so he can say any number he wants, and it is common for Presidents to to pass on the most painful steps to his successor, by putting off big tax increases or spending cuts until someone else is in the White House, but I doubt this President will put off the tax increases for very long!

The fifth lie:""Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day."

THE FACTS: This may be so, but it isn't only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries. The Clinton administration championed an easing of banking regulations, including legislation that ended the barrier between regular banks and Wall Street banks. That led to a deregulation that kept regular banks under tight federal regulation but extended lax regulation of Wall Street banks. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later an economic adviser to candidate Obama, was in the forefront in pushing for this deregulation.Source:MYWAY.com

The six lie: "In this budget, we will end education programs that don't work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them. We'll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we're not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don't use. We will root out the waste, fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn't make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas".
The truth is, his budget does not accomplish any of that. It only proposes those steps. That's all a president can do, because control over spending rests with Congress. Obama's proposals here are a wish list and some items, including corporate tax increases and cuts in agricultural aid, will be a tough sale in Congress.

Second, waste, fraud and abuse are routinely targeted by presidents who later find that the spending that a president might consider wasteful have staunch defenders in Congress who have fought off similar efforts in the past.

Lie seven is a whopper about energy savings. "Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double this nation's supply of renewable energy in the next three years."
The truth is While the president's stimulus package includes billions in aid for renewable energy and conservation, his goal is unlikely to be achieved through the recovery plan alone.

In 2007, the U.S. produced 8.4 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, including hydroelectric dams, solar panels and windmills. Under the status quo, the Energy Department says, it will take more than two decades to boost that figure to 12.5 percent
Source: Associated Press

And the eighth whopper is his promise that the Stimulus Plan will create jobs. ""Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs".
The truth of the facts is that job creation projections are uncertain even in stable times, and some of the economists relied on by Obama in making his forecast acknowledge a great deal of uncertainty in their numbers.

The president's own economists, in a report prepared last month, stated, "It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error."

Beyond that, it's unlikely the nation will ever know how many jobs are saved as a result of the stimulus. While it's clear when jobs are abolished, there's no economic gauge that tracks job preservation. The estimates are based on economic assumptions of how many jobs would be lost without the stimulus.
Source: Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn

Just like liars poker we the voting public will have to take his word or call him a liar, and wait and see what the results are. But if we wait will it be too late?