Free Republic

Joe Biden has been talking about the Biden/Harris campaign's effort to help American manufacturing, in the form of a $700 billion spending bill, essentially a repackaged version of an economic program that Senator Elizabeth Warren ran on in the primaries. The program, as Mr. Biden describes it, is a combination of $400 billion focused on federal purchases of goods, and $300 billion focused on federal grants and partnerships for research and development. On the surface, this doesn’t sound entirely bad. It’s not innovative either; presidents always propose spending programs. President Trump tried very hard to get a large infrastructure spending...

It’s not healthy to dwell on the past. But, for the taxpayers across the country, it is important to learn from past mistakes. The continued problems with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), aka Stimulus Plan, is a good lesson as to what not to do. The nearly trillion-dollar spending package, passed on a party-line vote in 2009, was supposed to rocket the economy out of the recession. The law funded absurd projects such as a snowmaking facility in Duluth, Minn., math and literacy coaches for North Carolina’s public school teachers, and a $3 million tunnel for turtles in...

A leading researcher on a ridiculed taxpayer-funded study of duck penises is now using her expertise on orca whales and is going to the "March for Science" to protest budget cuts. Patricia Brennan, a visiting lecturer at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, worked on the duck penis study that received $384,949 from the National Science Foundation, a grant that was funded through the 2009 stimulus package. The study looked at the differences in the corkscrew-shaped penises of ducks.

As President Obama so peevishly informed us all earlier this month, that the debate on repealing/replacing ObamaCare is now absolutely beyond contestation, so it would be really great if we could all just shut up and move on to more important things — like, say, the economy, because “the fifty or so votes Republicans have taken to repeal this law could have been fifty votes to create jobs by investing in things like infrastructure, more innovation.” That’s why the White House is leading by example and contrasting itself with Congress’s deliberately light legislative schedule — by proposing the same old...

Read $9 Billion in ‘Stimulus’ for Solar, Wind Projects Made 910 Final Jobs -- $9.8 Million Per Job to get an idea what does it means "green energy", green technology", etc.

Did Obama’s “Stimulus” Create or Save Jobs? The official line is that President Obama’s 2009 “stimulus” package (tax cuts and spending increases) “created or saved” more than 3.5 million jobs. Is that so? It depends on what you mean by created, saved, and jobs. It is certainly true that the federal government gave money to the states and localities, and some of that money was used to pay teachers, police officers, and firefighters. However, to say that this “saved” those jobs implies that they really would have vanished without federal money. In some cases, state and local politicians might have...

The failed federal anti-gunrunning program known as Operation Fast and Furious got so out of control in November 2009, it appeared the U.S. government was single-handedly "arming for war" the Sinaloa Cartel, documents show, even as ATF officials here kept lying to fellow agents in Mexico about the volume of guns it helped send south of the border. Those shocking allegations are revealed in the latest congressional report investigating the operation. At one point, agents say guns sold under the watch of the program took just 24 hours to travel from a gun store in Phoenix to a crime scene...

For three long years, the U.S. has been undertaking an experiment in economic policy. Could record levels of government spending, waves of new regulation and political credit allocation, and unprecedented monetary stimulus re-ignite growth? The results have been rolling in, and they represent what increasingly looks like an historic mistake that deserves to be called the Keynesian growth discount. The latest evidence is yesterday's disappointing report of 1.8% in first quarter GDP. At this stage of recovery after a deep recession, the economy is typically growing by 4% or more as consumer confidence returns and businesses accelerate investment as their...

For the past two years, economists writing on these pages and elsewhere have debated the merits of federal stimulus programs. President Obama's compromise on the Bush tax cuts this week might be seen as at least partial recognition that keeping marginal tax rates from rising across the board is the best stimulus now, especially if the deal leads eventually to making the cuts permanent. The economic data rolling in confirm that recent temporary, targeted stimulus programs have not worked, and that their enactment was a triumph of Keynesian wishful-thinking over practical experience. In September 2009, we reported on this page...

<p>By now, the only defense Democrats can mount of the Obama stimulus programs is that the economy would have been worse without them. There's no way to disprove this counterfactual, but now we have some empirical evidence other than 9.6% unemployment and 1.6% growth.</p>

There is a good reason that Obama no longer touts his "Green Jobs" and "Green Energy" programs. The potential for green jobs to increase under the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Stimulus program continues to turn a deeper color of brown every day.

RFFM.org's Executive Director, Dan Zanoza, will be a guest on the Dr. Laurie Roth Show [www.therothshow.com] on February 1, 2010 between 6 and 7 P.M. Central time. Zanoza will be discussing the Obama administration's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan" which may be actually luring U.S. homeowners into default or foreclosure. Zanoza first broke the story as a contract writer for the Illinois Family Institute http://www.illinoisfamily.org/news/contentview.asp?c=34682. Joining Dr. Roth and Zanoza will be a homeowner from central Illinois who is experiencing the nightmare brought upon her family through the reckless use of taxpayer stimulus money. Broadcast out of Washington state on...

WASHINGTON – A federal spending surge of more than $20 billion for roads and bridges in President Barack Obama's first stimulus has had no effect on local unemployment rates, raising questions about his argument for billions more to address an "urgent need to accelerate job growth." An Associated Press analysis of stimulus spending found that it didn't matter if a lot of money was spent on highways or none at all: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless. And the stimulus spending only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, the analysis showed. With the nation's unemployment rate at 10 percent...

Last week the Obama administration issued a report purporting to show that the President’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan had saved or created exactly 640,329 jobs. Such a precise number for such a fuzzy concept as jobs “saved or created” immediately raised doubts about the veracity of the report in any honest American’s mind. And since that report was issued, a once compliant press has filed story after story tearing the credibility of the Obama administration’s job creation claims to shreds. Just enter the words “stimulus”, “jobs”, and “report” in a Google News search and these are just some of...

The Obama White House has begun talks with congressional Democratic leaders on moves to extend health insurance subsidies, the $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit and jobless benefits, congressional and administration officials told FOX News late Friday.These moves were recently pulled together by White House economic advisers as an act of economic triage aimed at millions of chronically unemployed Americans. The White House is loathe to call this emerging package a second economic stimulus.Even so, President Obama tipped his hand that something was coming in Friday remarks on the economy in the Rose Garden."I'm working closely with my economic advisors...

We wouldn't want to "rush through" budgets before we have a chance to see whats in it would we?

Even some of the drive bys know they can't keep defending the porkulus when the economy keeps getting worse

CNBC Poll up: Would you want to join Rick Santelli's "Chicago Tea Party?" 11736 responses so far, 86% say YES! http://www.cnbc.com/id/29283701

Evidence Unearthed Obama’s Plan All Along Was to Repealed Clinton 96 Welfare Reform, which he just did with the Stimulus Package http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEhsjAcGayA&feature=channel_page