Missing in Action: Stimulus Sheriff Joe Biden
By Michelle Malkin - Oct 10, 2012
Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.
Remember when President Obama bragged about Joe Biden’s fiscal discipline creds in 2009? “To you, he’s Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him the Sheriff,” Obama warned government employees. “Because if you’re misusing taxpayer money, you’ll have to answer to him.” Fast-forward to 2012. Call in the search teams. Since being appointed the nation’s stimulus spending cop, Sheriff Joe has taken a permanent donut break.
He’s AWOL on oversight. In fact, he’s been bubble-wrapped, boxed and kept completely out of sight. The garrulous gaffe machine hasn’t sat down for a national media interview in five months.
The Democrats’ trillion-dollar “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” however, keeps piling up waste, failure, fraud and debt. Who benefited most? Big government cronies. According to Investor’s Business Daily this week, a new analysis by Ohio State University economics professor Bill Dupor reported that “(m)ore than three-quarters of the jobs created or saved by President Obama’s economic stimulus in the first year were in government.”
Dupor and another colleague had earlier concluded that the porkulus was a predictable jobs-killer that crowded out non-government jobs with make-work public jobs and programs. Indeed, the massive wealth redistribution scheme “destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs” by siphoning tax dollars “to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.”
Will this Keynesian wreckage come up during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate? It should be a centerpiece of domestic policy discussion. Nowhere is the gulf between Obama/Biden rhetoric and reality on jobs wider. Remember: Obama’s Ivy League eggheads behind the stimulus promised that “(m)ore than 90 percent of the jobs created are likely to be in the private sector.” These are the same feckless economic advisers who infamously vowed that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent — and that unemployment would drop below 6 percent sometime this year. Sheriff Joe rebuked the “naysayers” who decried the behemoth stimulus program’s waste, fraud and abuse. “You know what? They were wrong,” he crowed.
But Biden was radio silent about the nearly 4,000 stimulus recipients who received $24 billion in Recovery Act funds — while owing more than $750 million in unpaid corporate, payroll and other taxes. (Cash for Tax Cheats, anyone?)
He had nothing to say about:
<><> $6B in Homeowners' stimulus energy credits showered on nearly 1/3 of credit-claimers who had no record of homeownership, including minors and prisoners.
<><> $530 million dumped into profligate Detroit public schools for laptops and other electronics that had little, if any, measurable academic benefits.
<><> the whopping $6.7 million cost per job under the $50 billion stimulus-funded green energy loan program —
<><> stimulus funded politically connected (now bankrupt) solar firms,
<><> money laundries included Solyndra ($535M ), Abound Solar ($40M), Beacon Power ($43M), A123 ($250M) and Ener1 ($119M).
<><> $1 million stimulus went to Big Bird and Sesame Street “to promote healthy eating,” which created a theoretical “1.47” jobs (about $726,000 per job created.”)
<><> hundreds of stimulus millions to govt GSA junkets in Las Vegas and Hawaii,
<><> hundreds of millions to ghost congressional districts, dead people,
<><> hundreds of millions for infrastructures to nowhere and ubiquitous stimulus propaganda road signs stamped with the shovel-ready logo.
Of course, there’s no example of unfettered stimulus squandering more fitting than the one named after Keystone Fiscal Kop Joe Biden himself. Government-funded Amtrak’s Wilmington, Del., station raked in $20 million in “recovery” money after heavy personal lobbying by the state’s most prominent customer and cheerleader. In return, the station (which came in $6 million over budget, according to The Washington Times) renamed its facility after Biden. Bloated costs.
Crony political narcissism. Glaring conflicts of interest. Monumental waste.
This is the Obama/Biden stimulus legacy bequeathed to our children and their grandchildren. Sheriff Joe and his plundering boss need to be run out of town on a rail.
SOURCE http://dyn.realclearpolitics.com/topic/v/Vice_President_/
Thinking that, regardless of whether or not those districts actually existed, they were Democrat districts
Probably the same districts where all those phantom Democrat voters come from each election so I guess it all works out in the end
Excellent, Liz. Glad to see it but unfortunately none of it was ever publicized or revealed. I’ve said for years that the stimulus funds were Biden’s responsibility to account for and he never did and was never asked to. The public stayed ignorant of what was going on. We will never know the extent of the corruption behind that. If he is the demon-rat nominee, the president has to ask him only one question!!! But then, the moderators will no doubt not allow the participants to ASK the questions! So don’t make it a question - make it a statement OVER and OVER - that would work as well.