Posted on 07/04/2011 2:43:51 PM PDT by NoLibZone
When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.
The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.
In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.
Furthermore, the council reports that, as of two quarters ago, the “stimulus” had added or saved just under 2.7 million jobs — or 288,000 more than it has now. In other words, over the past six months, the economy would have added or saved more jobs without the “stimulus” than it has with it. In comparison to how things would otherwise have been, the “stimulus” has been working in reverse over the past six months, causing the economy to shed jobs.
Again, this is the verdict of Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisors, which is about as much of a home-field ruling as anyone could ever ask for. In truth, it’s quite possible that by borrowing an amount greater than the regular defense budget or the annual cost of Medicare, and then spending it mostly on Democratic constituencies rather than in a manner genuinely designed to stimulate the economy, Obama’s “stimulus” has actually undermined the economy’s recovery — while leaving us (thus far) $666 billion deeper in debt.
The actual employment numbers from the administration’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the unemployment rate was 7.3 percent when the “stimulus” was being debated. It has since risen to 9.1 percent. Meanwhile, the national debt at the end of 2008, when Obama was poised to take office, was $9.986 trillion (see Table S-9). It’s now $14.467 trillion — and counting.
All sides agree on these incriminating numbers — and now they also appear to agree on this important point: The economy would now be generating job growth at a faster rate if the Democrats hadn’t passed the “stimulus.”
Wouldn’t it have been easier to pay ten people $27K each to pick up litter?
Would’ve been cheaper, ten times more effective, and undoubtedly more productive.
So, seriously, where did all the money go then?
It didn’t go to anybody with a shovel.
Wonder how many jobs they killed pulling that 278,000 out of the private sector.
Man, the price for a vote theses days...!
I hear ya!
I miss the days when all it took was a menthol cigarette for the DNC to buy their votes.
For every $278,000 you could pay 8 people nearly $30,000 to clean, paint, repair etc and that money would immediately be put into the economy to pay for food, cloths, gasoline, utilities, a car, maybe a short vacation and THAT my friends would have stimulated the economy to the degree we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
The benefits of following such a program would have been so great that we would be swimming in prosperity right now if that had been done.
During the Depression, Government created public works jobs did just that.
Obama, on the other hand, gave massive payoffs to Democrat Party loyalist and the money simply disappeared down a Rat hole.
State govts to plug their budget shortfalls.
The money is sitting in bank vaults and the stock market. There is no way to get the money to the productive part of society without cutting taxes. And Marxists don’t believe in that.
So, a trillion down the drain.
That would have paid off every student loan in the country.
Just think of the stimulus to the economy of handing out what amount to lottery checks for a quarter million to over 2 million randomly selected people.....
You have to give the Baraqqi Regime credit for being brazen.
Most of the money went to pay union salaries in state govts.
They don’t worry much about legality.
http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/default.aspx
Here is a website that may explains some of the “stimulus spending”. I haven’t read it thoroughly myself.
Happy 4th!
Fly the Flag!
Does anyone remember obama’s “guess what” comment about spending money to stimulate the economy? TIA. It would seem appropriate to revisit that.
And the result of all those public works was a decade-long depression.
Sorry, but the laws of economics back then were just the same as the laws of economics today: irrespective of what group government favors, it cannot spend the country back to prosperity. If government takes from A in order to give to B, then B's gain is A's loss, and there is precisely 0 increase in wealth.
What ultimately ended the Great Depression was the abolishing of controls on prices and wages, allowing both to seek their market level with the smaller size of the money supply. Government-backed labor-union policies of higher-than-market wages, government-backed higher-than-market prices for farm products, and high tariffs on imports, were the triple-whammies that kept the U.S. economy in the doldrums for ten years (Thanks, Hoover! Thanks, FDR!).
I should add that it was not WWII that pulled us out of the Depression. The war, however, did give the government the political excuses necessary to reverse some of its previous labor policies.
And these clowns tell us they cannot find enough things to cut to blanace the Fed Budget?
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