Obama's "Sidam Touch"

Pajamas Media's Tom Blumer.

According to the Urban Dictionary, a person with “the Sidam Touch” has an ability that is “[t]he opposite of The Midas Touch, which turns everything to gold.” A person with the Sidam Touch “breaks and/or ruins everything.”

To say that President Barack Obama and his administration, especially what’s left of his economic team, has the Sidam Touch is the understatement of the 21st century.

In early February 2009, in the run-up to the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), known to most as “the stimulus,” the newly sworn-in Obama flexed his Sidam Touch muscles, repeatedly telling the nation: “Doing nothing is not an option.” ...

So how has it worked out? In December 2010, James Cogan and John Taylor at the Hoover Institution overestimated the impact of the stimulus plan by saying that it accomplished “zero.” On May 12, Professors Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor released more precise results demonstrating that ARRA really “created/saved 450 thousand government-sector jobs and destroyed/forestalled one million private sector jobs.” For the math-challenged, that’s a net loss of 550,000 jobs. A bit over two years later, it is abundantly clear that doing nothing would have been vastly preferable.

I saw Nancy Pelosi on TV last night telling the audience that Obama's programs "created or saved" 3.5 million jobs, a claim that she has been making for over a year and one that has no basis in fact.

The question that has a lot of people asking is this: is Obama's Sidam Touch the result of ignorance or is it deliberate?  To put it another way: are Obama and the congressional Democrats wrecking the economy deliberately or by accident?