As President Joe Biden celebrated his 100th day in office on Thursday, political analysts across the spectrum took the opportunity to weigh in on his administration’s achievements.
As you would imagine, the view from the right was pretty dismal.
You may be surprised to hear, however, that not all liberals are giving the president high marks.
Former Obama economic adviser Steven Rattner is concerned — particularly with the massive size and scope of the administration’s $6 trillion of new spending bills.
Rattner appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday to say that, “the potential for mistakes, failure of execution here is high. … And if it fails … I think it will set back the cause of progressivism for several more decades.”
“Sure, I worry about inflation. Sure, I worry about the deficit and the debt. But I also worry about the execution job here,” Rattner explained. “This is a massive execution job. The last plan, the jobs plan alone, had 76 separate initiatives in it. All have to be created and executed.”
“Getting it executed, I think, in some ways, is going to be the president’s biggest challenge,” he noted. “He’s got to deliver, not just passage, but actual real results for Americans, and programs that people perceive are working or else we go back to government being the enemy again.”
The National Review’s Jim Geraghty reminds us of former President Barack Obama’s $840 billion stimulus package in 2009. He put then-Vice President Biden in charge of oversight.
“With a plan of this scale comes enormous responsibility to get it right. That is why I have asked Vice President Biden to lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort — because nobody messes with Joe,” Obama told Americans. “I have told each member of my cabinet as well as mayors and governors across the country that they will be held accountable by me and the American people for every dollar they spend.
“To you, he’s Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him, ‘the Sheriff’ — (laughter) — because if you’re misusing taxpayer money, you’ll have to answer to him.”
Well, even before his advancing years — and potentially dementia — took their toll on Biden, he was never known for his intelligence.
In a column published Friday, Geraghty took us on a little trip down memory lane.
Referring to the Obama Administration’s website set up so taxpayers could track spending, Geraghty wrote: “… lots of people had entered bad data and lots of spending was attributed to congressional districts that didn’t exist.”
He reminds us of the Solyndra debacle, the U.S. government-backed solar panel start-up company that quickly went bankrupt, costing taxpayers $535 million in loan guarantees. And he lists some of the less costly, but even more preposterous programs paid for with stimulus funds such as “funding for drunken mice at Florida Atlantic University, … ‘turtle tunnel’ in Florida, … Che Guevara–inspired puppet theater in Minnesota, … research supersonic corporate jets, … grant from the National Science Foundation for a Yale University study looking at ducks’ sexual behavior, [and] the tree giveaway program for wealthy neighborhoods in Denver.”
“And that’s just the waste,” Geraghty writes.
“By 2014, ‘investigators [had] proven 1,268 cases of fraud in the $840 billion stimulus program, resulting in $57 million in recovered funds.’ The Obama administration scored that as a win — because they caught the fraud itself.”
In the clip below, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, discusses the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. Suozzi tells him, “there’s no question there’s some waste in there.” But he adds, “it’s less than $100 billion in waste in there. … It’s a false narrative that there’s waste throughout this bill.”
Democrat Rep Suozzi concedes there’s “waste” in the Dems’ wish list: “no question there’s some waste”https://t.co/OhauSK46fi pic.twitter.com/GXhqwxPst5
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 9, 2021
I suppose $100 billion does seem trivial to Suozzi considering the lofty price tags of the new spending bills.
But to put some perspective on it, does anyone recall House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to approve a $2.5 billion funding request from former President Donald Trump to build the border wall?
The impasse led to a partial government shutdown at the end of 2018 that continued into 2019. The economy was strong at the time and there was no hint that a devastating plague was about to turn the world upside down.
From the stack of executive orders Biden signed on his first day in office to the current reckless progressive spending spree, the Biden administration’s assumption of too much power has already inflicted untold damage on our once great country.
For over 100 days, we’ve been forced to watch from the sidelines this administration’s determined efforts to completely transform the United States of America into progressives’ utopian fantasy.
Me, I’m rooting for failure. I hope it fails so spectacularly that the Democrats are utterly humiliated and their liberal ideals, their dangerous dreams of power, their disastrous, self-serving policies wind up in a big pile of smoldering ash for all Americans to see and to remember for years to come.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
