Fact Check: Joe Biden Mismanaged the 2009 Stimulus

CLAIM: Joe Biden led America’s economic recovery in 2009, when he oversaw the Obama administration’s stimulus.

VERDICT: FALSE. Biden’s management of the stimulus was a disaster, with a buggy website and failures like Solyndra.

Democrats keep citing Biden’s role in the 2009 stimulus as evidence that he would be best to manage the recovery of the American recovery from the coronavirus. Billionaire mega-donor and failed presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg made that argument on the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Thursday.

President Barack Obama campaigned on providing a $50 billion stimulus for the U.S. economy. By the time he took office, in the wake of the global financial crisis, that figure ballooned and eventually hit $862 billion in federal spending.

Obama gave Biden the job of overseeing the stimulus. But things went wrong from the start.

The official website monitoring the stimulus, Recovery.gov, was plagued by bugs, even listing stimulus grants as having been sent to congressional districts that simply did not exist.

Moreover, much of the spending went to state and local governments to protect public sector union jobs, not to generate economic growth in the private sector. Other grants went to pet projects that had very little broader economic impact.

Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) released a report on the waste in the stimulus, as Politico noted:

There’s $4.7 million for Lockheed Martin to study supersonic corporate jet travel. More than $210,000 for the National Institutes of Health to study the sex lives of college students. And roughly $233,000 for California college students to conduct exit polls in Africa about voting patterns.

One of the all-time bodacious federal scams was Obama’s “stimulus program.” All the Democrats got filthy rich.
Obama appointed Biden to “oversee “stimulus money distribution.” To date, still no full accounting as to
where it all went (not to worry, Hunter Biden, the Biden family, and the Obamas real estate agent know where it is).

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, 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 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 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: 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.

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.
<><> a whopping $6.7 million 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 theoretical 1.47 jobs ($726K 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's millions for infrastructures to nowhere,
<><> 100's of millions for endless stimulus propaganda
<><> millions for road signs stamped with Obama's "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_/

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