Do you Believe in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Stimulus?

21 Dec, 2009 by Warner Todd Huston

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Christmas for adults is never quite the same as Christmas for the under 12-year-old set. Not that it’s all bad if you are an adult, it’s just that it takes a different form for adults. For kids it’s all about the magic of Santa Claus. When you believe it all seems so wondrous. This blindly, uninformed reliance on mere belief is a perfect definition of the Democrat voter.

As an adult, of course, a lot of what many of us see during Christmas are the mounting bills for gifts, growing credit card debt, and draining bank accounts. It always makes for a bit of a dark cloud for which the silver lining is a day with family, the bright smiling faces of our kids on Christmas morning, and a celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus.

Recently I was reflecting on this Christmas reality trying to apply it as a metaphor for Obama’s wasted stimulus money. But, soon I realized that the only similarities between believing in Santa and believing in the stimulus is the fact that they are both a fantasy. Sadly, whereas Christmas offers much that is wonderful (despite that the bills will come due) the stimulus has no such silver lining… unless you are a Democrat politician needing votes because a vote getting device is all the stimulus really was.

A recent study bears witness to this cynical fact. It turns out that Democratic districts across the country got most of the stimulus cash from sugar daddy Obama. Worse, the places that did get the money weren’t even necessarily the most needy. The fact is, it was mere politics that decided which districts got what.

Rather, the study found that Democratic congressional districts received 1.89 times more money than GOP districts. The average award for Democratic districts was $439 million, while the average award for Republican ones was $232 million.

On average, Democratic districts also got 152 awards, while Republican ones got 94.

The report also says that “Oddly, the Mercatus study found far more stimulus money went to higher-income areas than lower-income areas.” But that is easily explained. Poor people, the kind that really could have used that stimulus money, don’t tend to vote much. But middle class and rich folks DO vote and that is where Obama put the stimulus money — in those districts from which he and his party could elicit votes due to the fact that they larded those areas with “free” cash.

Amazing. It wasn’t about the poor at all. In fact it was only about getting Democrats votes. This same thing happened with the wasted money during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal days. The poor in the south were ignored as FDR flooded the western states with New Deal programs. Why did he do that? Because he needed more votes in the west and didn’t need to convince poor southerners that really needed New Deal money to vote for him. Like fools, they already were. FDR didn’t help them because the New Deal was only about getting votes, not helping the struggling country.

Obama learned this lesson well from FDR and used his stimulus money to secure a voter base in areas that he knew would vote if they felt they’d been paid off well.

So, Merry Christmas. But don’t expect Santa to bring you any stimulus money and don’t expect the tooth fairy to leave any of it under your pillow even if you do happen to really need it. Obama is not interested in need.

It’s all about the votes.