Barack Obama is defending the "stimulus" bill:

President Barack Obama said his $787 billion stimulus bill “has worked as intended” as he pushed back against Republican criticism that his recovery program has failed to rescue the economy.

“It has already extended unemployment insurance and health insurance to those who have lost their jobs in this recession,” Obama, who is traveling today in Ghana, said in his weekly Saturday radio and Web address. “It has delivered $43 billion in tax relief to American working families and business.”

Were it not for the stimulus program, the president said, “state deficits would be nearly twice as large as they are now, resulting in tens of thousands of additional layoffs -- layoffs that would affect police officers, teachers, and firefighters.”

Obama is living in a fantasy land if he thinks his economic plans are working "as intended." It was sold as a plan to "create" jobs and keep down unemployment, which was never supposed rise above 8% with "stimulus" bill. It has failed as unemployment is well over 9% and is expected to rise over 10%, by the president's own admission.

Obama's claim about state deficits may be true, but all Congress has done is nationalized those deficits and contributed to the budget deficit of the country as a whole. Bastiat wrote about the unseen effects of this economic view.

The inevitable crowding out of the economy to come and the higher interest rates that go with it should be a concern. We're going to go through all of this again in ten years.