Joe Biden – Liar, liar, pants on fire

There really is not a single person in this administration who can actually tell the truth:

In an EXCLUSIVE interview on “This Week,” host Jake Tapper asked Biden whether, in retrospect, the stimulus was too small given the dismal jobs situation in the country.

“There’s a lot of people at the time argued it was too small,” he said. “A lot of people in our administration…even some Republican economists and some Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman, who continues to argue it was too small.”

“But, you know,” Biden told Tapper, “there was a reality. In order to get what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes. And we found three. And we finally got it passed,” Biden said.

But if it wasn’t for the legislative reality, Biden explained, “I think it would have been bigger. I think it would have been bigger. In fact, what we offered was slightly bigger than that. But the truth of the matter is that the recovery package, everybody’s talking about it [like] it’s over. The truth is now, we’re spending more now this summer than we — I’m calling this…the summer of recovery,” the Vice President said.

Translation: It would have been an even “better” “summer of recovery” if those stingy GOPer would have cooperated more and allowed Congress and the administration to spend more money.

The only type of “summer recovery” currently ongoing is the numerous conservatives picking up their jaws up off the floor after that jaw-dropping lie about the stimulus amount. Ed Morrisey fact checks:

Really? The Obama administration wanted to spend more than $862 billion, and it was the GOP that forced them into a supposed Pic-n-Save Porkulus instead? That is an easy allegation to fact-check. All we need to do is re-read the stimulus proposal that came from Christine Romer and the rest of Barack Obama’s economic advisers in January 2009, before Obama took office and delivered a stimulus proposal to Congress. This proposal formed the basis for the claim that Porkulus would keep unemployment below 8% and restart the economy. How much did Romer propose spending to have that effect? Let’s look at page 4, emphasis mine:

A. Aggregate Jobs Effects

Estimating the aggregate employment effects of the proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan involves several steps. The first is to specify a prototypical package. We have assumed a package just slightly over the $775 billion currently under discussion. It includes a range of measures, all of which have been discussed publicly.

The only other figure mentioned for the total expenditure on a stimulus package in this proposal is $600 billion, in a quote from Mark Zandi on the potential breakout of efforts from government stimulus on page 9. Using the “slightly over the $775 billion” model (Democrats got $862 billion from Congress), these were the projections made by Romer and the incoming Obama administration for impact on the unemployment rate — and the actual results, from Innocent Bystanders:

Make sure to read the whole thing, especially the two quotes he provides from President Obama talking early last year about how the stimulus package amount was “in the right range” and “the right size.”

Thank goodness this administration isn’t made out of wood. If it was, its collective nose would be stretched out from Washington, DC all the way to the the San Francisco coast, parallel to Nancy Pelosi’s own growing nose.