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 Bidens fiscal discipline creds in 2009? To you, hes Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him the Sheriff, Obama warned government employees. Because if youre misusing taxpayer money, youll have to answer to him. Fast-forward to 2012. Call in the search teams. Since being appointed the nations stimulus spending cop, Sheriff Joe has taken a permanent donut break.
Hes AWOL on oversight. In fact, hes been bubble-wrapped, boxed and kept completely out of sight. The garrulous gaffe machine hasnt 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 Investors Business Daily, a new analysis by Ohio State economics professor Bill Dupor reported that (m)ore than three-quarters of the jobs created or saved by Pres Obamas 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 Biden's debates? It should be a centerpiece of domestic policy discussion. Nowhere is the gulf between Obama/Biden rhetoric and reality on jobs wider. Remember: Obamas 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 programs waste, fraud and abuse. You know what? They were wrong, he crowed.
Sheriff 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
<><> politically connected Green companies are now bankrupt---they took the money then went belly-up
<><> remember? Solyndra ($535M), Abound Solar ($400M), Beacon Power ($43M), A123 ($250M) and Ener1 ($119M).
<><> $1 million to Big Bird and Sesame Street to promote healthy eating, for a made-up 1.47 jobs ($726,000 per job created.)
<><> hundreds of stimulus millions to govt GSA junkets in Las Vegas and Hawaii,
<><> hundreds of millions to ghost congressional districts, dead people,
<><> 100'$ of millions for infrastructures to nowhere
<><> millions for Obama propaganda----road signs stamped w/ the shovel-ready logo.
Of course, theres no example of unfettered stimulus squandering more fitting than the one named after Keystone Fiscal Kop Joe Biden himself. Government-funded Amtraks Wilmington, Del., station raked in $20 million in recovery money after heavy personal lobbying by the states 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_/
Democrats corruption must be how tar and feathering got started?.