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The government watchdog overseeing economic stimulus spending says the White House was too quick to take credit for saving or creating 640,000 jobs. The White House trumpeted job figures released last month, saying they proved the administration is on track to save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

On Sunday President Obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers, said the "recession is over." But in the next breath he called for more government action to stimulate the economy, in particular the pace of hiring. As far as the administration is concerned, it is government stimulus that brought us this recovery. Now it seems to think it's just a matter of piling on even more government spending to generate job growth. In one sense we agree completely with Summers. The recession is over. In fact, the economy has been growing since June. This came as no surprise to us. "An...

If You Thought The Economy Was Being Inflated By The Stimulus, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet Vincent FernandoDec. 15, 2009, 6:41 AM Think the economy is being inflated by economic stimulus right now? Well if that's the case, then get ready for a ride over the next two years.The majority of Obama's stimulus hasn't even been spent yet. Thus the support won't disappear any time soon, and actually could accelerate. There's still another 70% to go. Slate: Since it was passed in February 2009, only $237.6 billion (30 percent) of the $787 billion package has entered the economy. The tax...

Stimulus Funds University…Retirements? Bethany Stotts, December 14, 2009 Bethany Stotts Over $43 million in federal stimulus funds will be spent on outgoing Iowa state university employees, reports the Press Citizen today. University officials claim these monies—directed toward the retiring or those who already took early retirements—will “save jobs” in the end. Gunnar Olson reports: More than $43 million of federal stimulus money meant to save or create jobs is being spent on salaries and benefits for outgoing employees by Iowa’s three state universities. The University of Iowa has directed $33.4 million in stimulus money to the salaries of employees taking...

The Obama administration makes plenty of noise about its risible “saved or created” accounting for jobs, but how much of Porkulus goes to ending jobs? In Iowa, over $43 million in stimulus funds will pay the salaries of outgoing professors in three universities: More than $43 million of federal stimulus money meant to save or create jobs is being spent on salaries and benefits for outgoing employees by Iowa’s three state universities. The University of Iowa has directed $33.4 million in stimulus money to the salaries of employees taking early retirement or otherwise leaving the university by June 30. Iowa...

President Obama is calling on the financial industry to help dig the economy out of the pit the White House says it helped create, as the president and bank executives headed into a potentially tense meeting Monday morning. President Obama is calling on the financial industry to help dig the economy out of the pit the White House says it helped create, as the president and bank executives headed into a potentially tense meeting Monday morning. The president set the tone for the meeting in an interview broadcast the night before in which he called Wall Street bankers "fat cats"...

High speed rail is a glamorous idea -- it's fun to imagine a train streaking through the cornfields from Chicago to St. Louis in four hours. Less glamorous are some of the fixes that need to be made to Chicago's notoriously slow freight rail system. Talk about projects like "signalize interlocking" and "grade separation," and eyes glaze over. But the promise of faster passenger rail is inextricably linked to the down-and-dirty business of freight. To make passenger and commuter trains move faster, you have to get the boxcars out of the way. And to do that, there needs to be...

Call it a stimulus, paying off a debt, but it's time to call it a work in progress. If the Federal Government is going to prop up the richest of the rich, isn't it time to add up the losses that Blacks have incurred during their time in America? Supporters of slave reparations argue that there is no equal opportunity for African Americans nor has there ever been. Systematic discrimination deprived African Americans of equal chances and deserved justice and parity. The clear lack of parity is seen in the recent instances of bailouts for the rich and distain for...

~SNIP~Congress passed a sizable fiscal stimulus. Yet things turned out worse than the White House expected. The unemployment rate is now 10 percent — a full percentage point above what the administration economists said would occur without any stimulus. To be sure, there are some positive signs, like reduced credit spreads, gross domestic product growth and diminishing job losses. But the recovery is not yet as robust as the president and his economic team had originally hoped. So what to do now? The administration seems most intent on staying the course, although in a speech Tuesday, the president showed interest...

HARTFORD — - The state's congressional delegation is pressuring Gov. M. Jodi Rell to get financing back on schedule for the Hartford-to-Springfield high-speed train system. Sens. Joseph Lieberman and Christopher Dodd advised Rell late Friday to quickly push through funding for engineering and surveying. Unless that work is done soon, they said, Connecticut might lose its shot at $80 million in federal funding this winter — and perhaps hundreds of millions later. "Put simply, a failure to authorize state funding for this preliminary work will jeopardize the state's ability to receive federal funding for this critical project," said a letter...

According to an analysis of federal payroll data by USA Today, the federal bureaucracy has flourished during the current recession. Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted. Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector. The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new Internal Revenue Service unit set up to catch rich tax cheats hiding their wealth in complex business entities is rapidly taking shape with the hiring of hundreds of employees. The IRS high wealth unit, part of a broader effort to combat international tax evasion, is focusing on "the entire web of business entities controlled by a high wealth individual," IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman told a tax conference this week. Another IRS official told Reuters "hundreds" of people have already been hired to staff the new unit, including some from within the agency. "We have drawn...

Peter Schiff destroys the Democrats and Obama yet with his economic policies. Republican Peter Schiff is running for Senate in Connecticut. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi9weNRxFss&feature=sub

Amid mounting criticism that minorities, women and low-income workers are missing out on business opportunities and jobs under the stimulus bill, the Obama administration is urging the nation's governors to work harder to ensure that these groups participate fully in state transportation projects that receive federal funding. The issue of equity has cast a cloud over the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in recent weeks as various reports appear to confirm what minority advocates and some economists have been saying: that the fruits of the stimulus bill may not be reaching groups who are suffering the most in the worst...

Bae Yong Joon may be one of the few oenophiles still living in Korea based on wine's dropping popularity on the peninsula. (Photo courtesy of Arnaldo Bassini) Wine sales in Korea are continuing to decline according to a Dec. 8 Korea Times article. The Korea Customs Service told the Times that 2009 (at least the first 10 months) was the first year they noticed a decline in wine sales in Korea since the Asian financial crisis reached its zenith in 1998. However, the South Korean government expect wine imports from Europe and South America to improve after recently signed free-trade...

Need a job ? Go to Washington DC. The increase in government jobs—courtesy of stimulus planning and spending—is turning Washington, D.C., into a boomtown. Scan the national horizon and it's hard to find many cities with a robust job market. In Los Angeles, unemployment sits just under 13 percent; in Detroit, it's at 17 percent; and in Houston, it's at 10.3 percent. There is, however, one exception: Washington, D.C. A boom in government jobs, courtesy of stimulus spending and the city's ability to hunker down during tough times, has kept the unemployment rate for the area (which includes D.C., Northern...

It sounds like the lead in to a bad joke: What do a Chicago-based dinner cruise company, a study of libidinous female college students and a former Hillary Clinton advisor have in common? But the joke is on us, because each of the above has been awarded hefty doses of taxpayer-funded stimulus money since February, according to a new stimulus report card by Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain. In his “jobs speech” this week, President Obama implicitly acknowledged that last February’s $1.2 trillion stimulus package has failed. Then he demanded another one in order to bolster his plan to...

To put it kindly there have been many issues with the execution of the stimulus bill passed by the progressive Democrats in Congress without so much as peeking at what was in it. After the bill was passed the American Public was assured that everything would be OK, after all the SCHMOTUS, Joe Biden was going to make sure. On March 12th Biden, told us that we were going to be protected from stupid uses of the $787 billion dollar stimulus money: So if this -- six months from now, if the verdict on this effort is that we've wasted...

A Minneapolis puppet show is caught up in the controversy over how some of the billions in economic stimulus dollars have been spent. Some members of Congress targeted the Heart of the Beast Theater as an example of wasteful spending. The theater, located on East Lake Street for 37 years, received a $25,000 economic stimulus grant. Kathee Foran, executive director of the theater, said the grant for which the theater applied had to be tied to a specific job. Foran said the money was used to save the job of their community program director--who duties include booking shows outside the...

The Wall Street Journal reported today about the Democrat's political abuse of TARP, which was created to "save the financial system" in a time of "crisis". (I don't buy into that, but I digress.). The original description of the program, according to Federal Reserve's own website was...

It has not escaped the notice of the great unwashed and unruly that the stimulus plan was never meant to create jobs. As the housing industry collapsed, construction sector jobs began shedding like water. Meanwhile, due to government mismanagement of funds during the long bull market (a practical refutation of Keynesian economics if ever their was one), infrastructure had devolved into dangerous disrepair. Putting on our Keynesian hats for a moment, it made some sense that if we were going to spend untold billions of tax payer dollars we could quickly re-purpose construction workers to rebuild infrastructure in 'shovel ready'...

The Hill reports on the $787 billion stimulus stimulus package passed by Barry and Congress was most effective in ensuring job security. Unfortunately for the rest of America, the stimulus bill served none other than Clinton and Obama's campaign pollsters and fellow campaign staffers. "Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn." "Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was issued to Penn’s...

Mark Penn, who worked as Hillary Clinton's pollster during her 2008 presidential run, reportedly received $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus package so he could preserve three jobs at his public relations firm.

Treasury Department Releases Text of Letter from Secretary Geithner to Hill Leadership on Administration’s Exit Strategy for TARP WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of the Treasury released the text of identical letters sent today from Secretary Tim Geithner to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid outlining the Administration's exit strategy for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) established by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA). The text of the letter to Speaker Pelosi follows. December 9, 2009 The Honorable Nancy Pelosi Speaker U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC 20515 Dear Madam Speaker: I am writing to update...

Japan Bets $81B On Plan To Avoid “Double-Dip Recession” By Rocky Vega 12/08/09 Stockholm, Sweden – Today Japan decided on spending 7.2 trillion yen, or $81 billion, in stimulus. The funds will be used for loan guarantees and employment subsidies as well as to encourage purchases of energy-efficient goods. However, according to Bloomberg coverage: “Not everyone thinks the spending will help the economy. Morgan Stanley Asia Chairman Stephen Roach said Hatoyama needed to be ‘much more aggressive’ with his policies. “‘It’s tiny,’ Roach said of the stimulus in an interview on Bloomberg Television yesterday. ‘This is an economy that went...

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, who was Hillary Rodham Clinton's pollster in the 2008 presidential election. Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson'Marsteller, the global public'relations and communications firm headed by Penn.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama outlined major new government stimulus and jobs proposals on Tuesday, saying the nation must continue to “spend our way out of this recession.” Without giving a price tag, Obama proposed a package of new spending for highway, bridge and other infrastructure projects, deeper tax breaks for small businesses and tax incentives to encourage people to make their homes more energy efficient. “We avoided the depression many feared,” Obama said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. But, he added, “Our work is far from done.”

President Barack Obama pressed forward with an expansion of his $787 billion stimulus plan Tuesday, unveiling job-creation proposals that largely build on the initial package, including a hiring tax credit that his own party jettisoned as unworkable and some business owners deemed ineffective. In a speech at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama avoided calling his jobs push a new stimulus plan. But White House officials acknowledged that the president was taking stimulus components that he believed worked best and extending or amplifying them. These include putting an additional $50 billion toward infrastructure spending, ramping up Treasury Department lending to small...

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Hussein Obama outlined new multibillion-dollar stimulus and jobs proposals Tuesday, saying the nation must continue to "spend our way out of this recession" until more Americans are back at work. Without giving a price tag [because he doesn't know or care how much it would cost], Obama proposed a package of new spending for highway, bridge and other infrastructure projects, deeper tax breaks for small businesses and tax incentives to encourage people to make their homes more energy efficient [I thought we still had funds left from the "stimulus" package?]. "We avoided the depression many...

Even though I have never said a word about my wife spending money on herself (which she rarely does anyway), she still likes to come up with transparent excuses for spending. One of my favorites is when she buys an outfit and then brings it back. Say the outfit cost $100, and my wife returns it but comes home with a new dress that cost $150, she will say it was a $50 outfit. The only reason I bring this up is that it perfectly explains the President's plan for using the TARP dollars to create jobs. Its nothing but...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama called for a major new burst of federal spending Tuesday, aiming to jolt the wobbly economy into a stronger recovery and reduce painfully persistent double-digit unemployment. Despite Republican criticism concerning record federal deficits, Obama said the U.S. must continue to "spend our way out of this recession" as long as so many people are out of work. More than 7 million Americans have lost their jobs since the recession began two years ago, and the jobless rate stands at 10 percent, a statistic Obama called "staggering."

...before we look at spending any more dollars on a new porkulus plan, shouldn't we look at what was done with the first one? After all its nine months after its passage and only around $200 billion of stimulus funding there are millions of Jobs lost and a bogus number of jobs gained. Tom Coburn and John McCain have created a report of the 100 Dumbest Porkulus Projects proving that .....billions of dollars of stimulus funding have been wasted, mismanaged, or directed towards silly and shortsighted projects. Many projects may not produce the types of jobs that most Americans had...

President Obama used his speech rolling out a stimulus-style jobs program Tuesday to point the finger at Republicans for allegedly facilitating the economic crisis and then foisting it off on his administration to solve. While praising his own team for pioneering "ambitious" financial reform and "sweeping" economic recovery initiatives, the president took some pointed shots at Republicans who are now blasting the latest package as a spend-crazy "stimulus two" that will drill deeper into the deficit. "We were forced to take those steps (to jump-start the economy) largely without the help of an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided...

58 percent of voters oppose an Obama Administration plan to bail out states with “serious financial troubles” as the President gets set for an evening address to the nation on the state of the economy. According to Rasmussen reports’ most recent phone survey, “just 22% of Americans favor providing federal bailout funds to states with serious financial problems. Fifty-eight percent (58%) oppose giving bailout money to financially troubled states.” Obama is expected to outline his plans to send aid to California, New York, and other states near default with repaid TARP funds tonight when he addresses Americans who are increasingly...

Last week the national unemployment rate dropped to 10 percent. This is a good thing only because last month unemployment was over 10 percent. Unemployment in double digits is yet another reminder that the stimulus was and is an epic failure. So it's especially ironic to read this in liberal blogger Hugh Jackson's recent City Life column. "[T]he stimulus is doing what it is supposed to do, it is contributing to ending the recession," Moody's economist and former McCain-Palin economic adviser Mark Zandi recently told the New York Times... The creation of new jobs is the least significant impact of...

President Barack Obama says staggering job losses mean the United States must continue to "spend our way out of this recession" with a round of new incentives for hiring. In a speech, Obama proposed a package intended to stimulate job creation and bring down the country's 10 percent unemployment rate. The measures include more money for infrastructure projects, tax cuts and credit access for small businesses. It also includes rebates to consumers who make their homes more energy efficient.(continued)

Senate Democrats, who are hoping to spend the country into a communist revolution, are crafting another stimulus program that's designed to get Americans back working. And have their children pay their wages. The new program, called No Child Left A Dime, will release another "couple few hundred billion" into the American economy, magically creating jobs, careers, factories, roads, and fuzzy warm slippers for everyone. Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and sleazy guy depicted in the movie Casino, said the plan makes sense. Reid said the money to fund the program will be printed on the Federal Reserve Boards magic...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's government agreed on a $81 billion stimulus package on Tuesday, aimed at preventing the economy from tipping back into recession as deflation persists and a strong yen threatens exports. Economists said the 7.2 trillion yen plan, equal to about 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, would not provide a significant lift to an economy dependent on overseas demand for machinery, electronics and cars. While several other economies are already debating phasing out economic stimulus deployed to fight the financial crisis, Japan continues to struggle amid chronically weak consumer demand and falling prices. The budget underscores the...

The Obama Administration is touting that their stimulus program has saved or created 640,329 jobs since it was enacted back in February through the end of October. This number is updated and posted on the Administration’s recovery.gov web site. That amounts to $246,436 per job based on the $157.8bn that has been awarded so far!

Inflation will not get out of control, Bernanke promises...

(CNSNews.com) – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed the idea of a “global” tax on stock trades and other financial transactions, saying the estimated $150 billion in annual revenue from such a tax could be used to help fund more stimulus spending. At her weekly press briefing on Thursday, Pelosi said the financial transactions tax (HR4191) currently before Congress would have to be made “global” to keep U.S. investors from taking their business overseas and out of taxable reach. The House speaker said that a transaction tax could be imposed in conjunction with congressional efforts to divert funds from the...

Gibson:"The White House has been under considerable scrutiny regarding the number of jobs created by the 727 B dollar economic stimulus program. Reports from the administration and congress have provided only rough estimates. So we asked Chris B… if he could find evidence to what the program had paid off. “ Plays video :”For these police cadets in MO, teachers in VA and construction workers in PA the stimulus means paychecks…….”. The rest of video is all the grateful workers who got jobs partially funded by the stimulus. Report ends with: “…but any jobs are better than none say the...

Follow the bouncing ball: TARP, the trillion-dollar-plus banking bailout, has morphed from a toxic assets purchase plan to a capital injection plan, back to a toxic assets purchase plan, to a life insurance company bailout, to an auto supplier bailout. I’m sure I forgot more. Well, now the Democrats want to use it to bail out state governments and convert unused TARP bucks into…a government union slush fund.

If you still have a job, maybe Friday's numbers from the Labor Department will give you a chance to exhale. Since the recession began in December 2007, the employment market, for the most part, has been one negative headline after another. Now, we've learned that the U.S. lost only 11,000 jobs in November, that the unemployment rate surprisingly ticked down from 10.2% the previous month to only 10%, and that for the prior two months the total of jobs lost actually wasn't as bad as initially thought. The last time the data were so bright, if they can be called...

The Obama administration held another photo-op summit yesterday, this one focusing on jobs.  Unemployment figures released this morning for November continue in double digits showing 10 percent of Americans unemployed.  That figure does not include the underemployed or those who have simply quit looking for work.  The economy has lost nearly four million jobs since Obama’s failed, trillion-dollar stimulus spending package was rammed through Congress. Noticeably missing from Obama’s “jobs summit� participant list were the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. According to Fox News’ business guru Neil Cavuto, these three...

(snip) Don Imus and the Arizona Republican were talking Friday morning about the February stimulus vote when McCain, who kept his famous temper at bay during the '08 campaign, went Howard Beale. Imus: Did you support that bill? McCain: Hell no. Imus: I don't think you have to swear at me Senator when I'm just asking a... McCain: I'm not swearing at you. I'm swearing I've had to have been smoking something pretty strong to vote for that outrageous use of taxpayers' dollars. Toggling to the economy at large, McCain added: "There's not a lot of happy people out there,...

Nevada has overestimated the number of higher education jobs so far "retained" with federal stimulus aid, according to a state budget official. The revised count is about 1,400, a steep drop from the nearly 2,100 that state and federal officials have touted for weeks. Victor Redding, budget director of the Nevada System of Higher Education, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal the inflated figure, which is still posted on a state Web site that tracks jobs created or retained with Recovery Act funds, resulted from a miscount by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The White House Jobs Summit was Thursday, and in case you have any hope for it actually helping produce real jobs, keep in mind two things.

Lately, Republicans have had a field day attacking the Obama administration for rising unemployment. The first Friday of every month, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the previous month's unemployment rate, has become a day Republicans eagerly look forward to and Democrats dread. In part, Democrats have themselves to blame. In promoting a big fiscal stimulus earlier this year, two of the administration's top economists, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, estimated that the unemployment rate would not go above 8% if stimulus were enacted. It has been well above that rate since February and is now above 10%. In...