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Obama Wreckovery Act And Stimulus 'Employment': The Pathetic Reality
Start Thinking Right ^ | June 17, 2009 | Michael Eden

Posted on 06/17/2009 6:13:12 PM PDT by Michael Eden

I downloaded the Obama administration's "Recovery Report: 100 Days, 100 Projects." It was an utterly laughable experience.

I copied the "100 projects" into a Word file and then conducted a search with the word "employees." Here were the results of EVERY single occurrence:

9) A company in Maine "that had been struggling to pay its 19 employees" now being "back to work" thanks to a $2 million stimulus handout.

14) A New York construction company was able to rehire laid-off seasonal employees. Slate Hill had previously laid off 40 seasonal employees, possibly at the END OF THE SEASON. There is no mention of how many seasonal employees (meaning these are not full time jobs) were rehired, but the cost was over $7 million of your dollars in stimulus contract money.

15) The president of New Hampshire paving company Continental Paving ESTIMATES he would have had to lay off 75 employees if it weren’t for the Recovery Act (I "estimate" he may be a liberal). In any event, however many of those 75 jobs were actually "saved" come at the cost of $10 million in stimulus money.

29) EnergX, a Department of Energy contractor, has 87 new employees on the job. We're told that that these jobs "are supported by Recovery Act funding" - whatever that means. No mention of how much government money they are getting.

51) An auto-repair business owner received $463,500 in stimulus funds which we're told are "strengthening his short-term cash flow and putting him and his 10 employees in position to increase sales as the economy turns around." Note that no mention is made of any new employees hired.

58) A start-up tire-recycling plant owner had borrowing fees of $45,750 for a $1.715 million equipment loan paid by stimulus funds. The owner "hopes to have 34 employees onboard by New Year’s Day next year." Clearly, IF the owner is able to hire 34 employees, it will NOT be due to the pissant borrowing fees for the near $2 million in private bank loans.

75) Four hundred employees hired using Recovery Act funding reported for work at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State. Now we're getting somewhere! 400 plus a few employees from the other 74 programs, at a cost of ONLY $3.27 TRILLION!!! We're not told how much these employees cost taxpayers, but we ARE told that most of the employees will be UNION.

83) A company selling and installing energy-saving window films for commercial buildings, saved $6,970 in fees on its SBA 504 loan when it bought a new space five times larger than its previous home. We're told "the savings will help owners John and Kimberly Henderson add three employees to their staff of 12." If you know any business owner who has ever hired full-time employees, ask him or her how much $7 grand in saved fee-money would go toward such a hiring decision. And THINK ABOUT IT: $3.27 TRILLION DOLLARS, AND OBAMA IS POINTING AT "HELPING" HIRE 3 EMPLOYEES IN ITS LIST OF HIS TOP 100 ACHIEVEMENTS!!!

And that's IT. That's ALL THE JOBS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SEEMS TO BE ABLE TO ACCOUNT FOR. And most of the list of EIGHT businesses really aren't able to hire employees based on anything Obama did with his - did I mention? - $3.27 TRILLION in porkulus.

Think about it: this is Obama's own "Look what we've accomplished!" list. This is all the man has to show for the largest spending bill in the history of human civilization! How would Mister Rogers put it: "Can you say, "pathetic"? I think you can!"

I wrote an article earlier this month titled, "Obama And Unemployment: Just So You Know How Pathetically Incompetent Dear Leader Is." You might say it's a harshly-worded title - until you see just what a ZERO Obama (who interestingly enough is often ALSO called "Zero") has produced with more money than any government has ever spent in the entire history of the planet. That article mentions facts such as how Republicans were shut out of the bill; how no one in Congress was even allowed to read it before it was rushed through; how Republicans PREDICTED it would be a gigantic boondoggle; how Obama time after time boasted that he'd "saved" jobs only to see those very jobs go down the drain; how Obama created a marketing term called "saved jobs" to "create" 150,000 phantom jobs out of thin air that he could take credit for; how the stimulus money isn't even going to the poorest counties that need help most; and how the Obama administration promised that unemployment - which is now at 9.4% - would NOT go above 8% if his stimulus bill was passed. And on, and on. Hence the disparaging title describing a failed president and a failed economic policy.

Obama is now claiming that his administration will "create or save" 600,000 MORE phantom jobs. Just realize that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is already on record claiming it has no way to verify Obama's job numbers. Because they are a fantasy (Michelle Malkin calls it "The biggest most magical makework program ever"). The mainstream media - which adores their new "Dear Leader" - would never haved allowed President Bush to make claims about "saved" jobs. The whole thing is like building a house of cards in the wind.

All that as an introduction to this:

Stimulus program fraught with waste, report says

A Republican senator's office says stimulus funds are going toward dubious projects, such as a $3.4-million tunnel for turtles. Obama aides say the report is flawed.

By Peter Nicholas, June 15, 2009

Reporting from Washington -- A report due to be released today by a Republican senator contends the Obama administration's stimulus program is fraught with waste and incompetence -- evidenced by a turtle crossing in northern Florida that will cost more than $3 million and a snafu in which thousands of Social Security checks went out to people who had died.

Modeled after a release from the White House describing 100 stimulus projects that were in the works, the report put out by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma looks at the same number of projects but reaches starkly different conclusions. The title is "A Second Opinion on the Stimulus."

"Will these projects make real improvements in the lives of taxpayers and communities or are they simply pet projects of politicians and lobbyists that never got off the ground because they are a low priority?" the report says.

Coburn's staff spent about a month interviewing federal officials, reviewing data and compiling news clippings in a continuing examination of the $787-billion stimulus package.

Millions of dollars are going toward bicycle lockers, bike paths, walking trails and a skate park, Coburn said. One town in North Carolina is using stimulus funds to hire an administrator whose job will be to procure more stimulus funds, according to the report. [...]

A theme of Coburn's work is that money is going toward dubious projects that will leave little imprint. One project mentioned is the $3.4-million construction of a 13-foot tunnel near Tallahassee, Fla., that will allow turtles and other wildlife to safely cross U.S. Highway 27.

The report said the area "has the highest road-kill mortality rate for turtles in the world." But it also suggests other uses for the money, and mentions Florida State University's plans to lay off 200 faculty and staff members in hopes of saving millions of dollars.

Officials at the Florida Department of Transportation defended the project as one that not only would save turtles but also protect motorists. "A lot of these turtles are quite large. They get hit by a car, and they turn into flying objects," said Josh Boan, the department's natural resources manager.

Construction on the tunnel is to begin in September. State officials could not estimate how many jobs would be created.

Raising questions about the government's ability to manage the stimulus money, Coburn's report also focuses on more than 8,000 Social Security checks that have been mailed to people who are dead.

A spokesman for the Social Security system said the checks were mailed based on erroneous records. In most cases, the Postal Service returns the checks directly to the government.

One $250 check went to the home of Antonietta Santopadre, a 74-year-old retired hairdresser living in New York. The check was made out to her father, who died 35 years ago. In an interview Monday, Santopadre said: "I was infuriated. Where's our money going? Our country is in such trouble right now."

The Coburn report entitled "A Second Opinion on the Stimulus" is now available. Some of the section titles:
- “Free” Stimulus Money Results in Higher Utility Costs for Residents of Perkins, Oklahoma.

- FutureGen: The Stimulus Earmark that Wasn’t, Becomes the Costliest Pork Project in History.

- Little-Used “Shovel-Ready” Bridges in Rural Wisconsin Given Priority Over Widely Used Structurally Deficient Bridges.

- $800,000 for little-used Johnstown, Pennsylvania airport to repave a back-up runway; the “Airport for Nobody” Has Already Received Tens of Millions in Taxpayer dollars [note: that's in pork-king and king-scumbag Jack Murtha's district].

- $3.4 Million for Wildlife “Eco-Passage” in Florida; Project Still May Take Years to Finish [note: that's the one about the turtles while 200 nearby employees are being laid off].

- Nevada Non-Profit Gets Weatherization Contract After Being Fired For Same Work.

- Non-Existent Oklahoma Lake in Line for Over $1 Million To Construct a New Guardrail.

- Taxpayers Taken for a Ride: Nearly $10 Million to be Spent to Renovate a Century Old Train Station that Hasn’t Been Used in 30 Years.

- Ten Thousand Dead People Get Stimulus Checks, Social Security Administration Blames a Tough Deadline.

-Town of Union, New York, Encouraged to Spend Money It Did Not Request For a Homelessness Problem It Does Not Have.

Mind you, this is just the porkulus bill. There was also the 9,287 pork-project-laden $410 billion Omnibus spending bill and the soon-to-come $1.5 trillion socialized health care bill (which will easily be triple that, given the longstanding tradition of massive underestimation of the actual cost of government programs).

And as we speak, Obama is showing how much he wants to save taxpayer money by illegally firing an Inspector General (in flagrant violation of a law he personally co-sponsored as a Senator) in order to protect one of his friends who abused Americorps funds.

One quote in particular that set me off:

In the course of his investigation, Walpin found [Sacramento Mayor and personal friend of Barack Obama Kevin] Johnson and St. HOPE had failed to use the federal money they received for the purposes specified in the grant and had also used federally-funded AmeriCorps staff for, among other things, "driving [Johnson] to personal appointments, washing his car, and running personal errands."
I don't know 'bout you, but I'm hoping to get me a job shinin' Massah Bureaucrat's shoes some day.

There are a whole lot of questions about whether Obama is creating any jobs with his massive government spending, but there is no question at all that the trillions of dollars being spent are all-too-real. And there is no question that the anvil will fall on the US economy due to the near doubling of the national debt as Obama adds a projected $9.3 trillion to the $11.7 trillion hole we're already in. Obama is borrowing 50 cents on the dollar as he explodes the federal deficit by spending four times more than Bush spent in 2008 and in the process "adding more to the debt than all presidents -- from George Washington to George Bush -- combined." And most terrifying of all, Obama's spending will cause debt to double from 41% of GDP in 2008 to a crushing 82% of GDP in 2019.

What will be the result of all this insane spending, and not very far off? A quote from a CNS News story should awaken anyone who thinks the future will be rosy:

By 2019, the CBO said, a whopping 82 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) will go to pay down the national debt. This means that in future years, the government could owe its creditors more than the goods and services that the entire economy can produce.
All that staggering hyperinflation-creating debt, and about the only jobs that are being created by it are washing cars and running errands for politically-connected Democrats.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Government; Society
KEYWORDS: employment; jobs; pork; stimulus

1 posted on 06/17/2009 6:13:13 PM PDT by Michael Eden
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To: Michael Eden

Excellent. But sad. And maddening.


2 posted on 06/17/2009 7:07:03 PM PDT by fightinJAG (Good riddance, UAW.)
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To: Michael Eden

typical when dims run the show. In Carter’s years we has stagflation. In Klintoons years we had boom years later to be discovered to be cooked books. Thanks state run media on our ruination. I hope you all die broke. Just desserts.


3 posted on 06/17/2009 7:17:29 PM PDT by Texas resident (Texan by birth and by choice.)
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To: fightinJAG

Just found this via Freep:

Think of the title as “Even KGB Russian PM Less Marxist than Barry Hussein.”

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/article/1009/42/378802.htm

The Moscow Times » Issue 4167 » Business
print
Putin Slams Obama Tax Proposal
16 June 2009The Moscow TimesPrime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday criticized U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign operations, saying it would amount to double taxation that will hurt the global economy.

“This is a serious decision for the world economy,” Putin said at a meeting of the Presidium, the government said on its web site. “If taxes are imposed on all companies working abroad, then it will mean the total destruction of the system for avoiding double taxation.”

Putin instructed Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin to hold discussions on the plan with Obama’s administration.

Kudrin met with finance ministers from the Group of Eight over the weekend and signed an agreement with Italy outlining a system for avoiding double taxation.

Obama has proposed canceling a provision of the tax code that allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to defer tax payments on money that is reinvested in local operations.

“It’s a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York,” he said in May, referring to the current state of the U.S. tax code, media reported.


4 posted on 06/17/2009 7:37:35 PM PDT by Michael Eden (It's "We pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor" time, people.)
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To: Texas resident

Someday, I am quite certain, we will have a chance to hunt the people who did this to us down with dogs.

I hope you are ready with your dogs when that day comes.

We will want two types of dogs:
1) fast dogs to run ‘em down;
2) Big dogs to keep ‘em down.


5 posted on 06/17/2009 7:39:59 PM PDT by Michael Eden (It's "We pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor" time, people.)
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To: Michael Eden

I have a VERY fast dog.


6 posted on 06/18/2009 2:11:05 PM PDT by Texas resident (Texan by birth and by choice.)
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To: Texas resident

Texas Resident.

Good.

Because I’ve got a VERY big dog.

If your dog can catch ‘em, my dog can make sure they don’t get up.


7 posted on 06/21/2009 12:50:56 PM PDT by Michael Eden (It's "We pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor" time, people.)
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