Free Republic

What does President Barack Obama know about the economy and what the government can and cannot do to create jobs? A fair measure is the economic stimulus plan Obama pushed through Congress in his first month in office. Did it work? On Jan. 9, 2009, less than two weeks before Obama's inauguration, Christina Romer, who would chair Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, an adviser to Vice President-elect Joe Biden, published the incoming administration's analysis of the "job impact" they expected from Obama's stimulus. At the time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national seasonally adjusted...

President Obama has finally admitted that a core premise of his nearly trillion-dollar stimulus package was false. In an interview this week with The New York Times' Peter Baker, the president acknowledged that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects," despite the president's near-constant invocation of the term over a two-year period to explain how government spending was going to create jobs. The president's admission is no minor matter; it goes to the heart of why his economic policies have been such a failure. Not since President Jimmy Carter's confession in 1980 that it took the Soviet Union's invasion of...

No one spends money like the federal government. This year alone, it will shovel out $3.7 trillion, which works out to $7 million a minute. So it may surprise you to find out the clearest lesson from the Obama administration's fiscal stimulus program: The government is not very good at spending money. On the contrary, it's slow and clumsy. Nearly a third of the $787 billion package, signed into law in February 2009, was assigned to infrastructure projects -- from fixing roads and building bridges to weatherizing buildings and upgrading electrical grids. The idea was to simultaneously improve our physical...

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex. The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling – however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011... Because AIDS researchers have been...

The White House last year released a supposedly scientific analysis that claimed to show that adopting the "stimulus" bill would cut unemployment. Indeed, the report specifically estimated that the unemployment rate today would be down to 7.5 percent. Something obviously went wrong...

Stimulus has been 'an absolute success,' says VP Biden By Michael O'Brien - 06/02/10 05:06 PM ET The Obama administration's signature stimulus program has been an "absolute success" so far, Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday. Biden, who heads up the administration's effort to implement the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), said the legislation will have saved or created between 3 and 3.5 million jobs before the end of 2010. "An absolute success," Biden termed the stimulus during an interview on "Charlie Rose" to air Wednesday evening. "We will create over 3.5 million or save over 3.5...

Obama: Stimulus led to big refunds By: Eamon Javers April 10, 2010 08:51 AM EDT President Barack Obama used his weekly radio and internet address Saturday to remind Americans that about one third of last year’s mammoth stimulus bill was made up of tax cuts – and those cuts are having an impact just in time for tax day, April 15. “So far, Americans who have filed their taxes have discovered that the average refund is up nearly ten percent this year –to an all-time high of about $3,000,” Obama said. “This is due in large part to the Recovery...

IMF: This Recovery Will Die Without More Stimulus Vincent Fernando, CFA Apr. 5, 2010, 5:25 AM The global recovery, and all the good data we've seen, depends heavily on government stimulus. Still. Says the IMF's managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Bloomberg:[snip]

Bad news on Good Friday for Obama: For the third consecutive month, the nation’s unemployment remains at 9.7 percent. Leftists will quickly point out that the economy did add 160,000 jobs, but will conveniently forget to tell you that those are temporary government jobs filled to misstate the 2010 census numbers so as to fraudulently increase the Democrats' numbers in Congress. Missing from the news is any hint of moral indignation or outrage over the missing trillion dollars that President Obama promised would save or add millions of jobs once the “stimulus” kicked in. Whatever happened to those trillion dollars,...

A transmission from Bizarro World via CBS’s “Early Show.” I know he has to say stuff like this — admitting that we just added more economic dead weight to an already crushing entitlement load would be politically catastrophic — but it’s still amazing to hear him say it. They really, truly are going to campaign on the idea that a raft of new federal health-care benefits is a money-saver, despite the glorious experiences of Medicare and RomneyCare and despite poll after poll showing that people expect costs to go up, not down. We can crunch the numbers every which way,...

FRESNO, Calif. — Officials in the heart of recession-battered central California misspent about $1 million in federal stimulus funds that were supposed to help adults and teenagers find jobs, state auditors said Tuesday. California's Inspector General Laura Chick said the Tulare County Workforce Investment Board used nearly $1 million in Recovery Act funds to pay for their own rent and utility bills, when the bulk of the money should have gone to finding youth summer jobs.

The writer, of Kiron, Iowa, is Iowa’s 5th Congressional District representative.When President Barack Obama signed his $787 billion “stimulus” bill into law last year, he said the bill was “the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs; to provide relief for families worried they won’t be able to pay next month’s bills; and to set our economy on a firmer foundation.” The actual results of the stimulus tell a different story. Since February 2009, our economy has lost nearly 3.3 million jobs. Despite President Obama’s statements that unemployment would...

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 CBO Report Was Pre-Ordained to Show the Stimulus Succeeded    [Brian Riedl] The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has produced a new report estimating that the $862 billion stimulus has thus far saved or created 1.5 million jobs. Yet the CBO’s calculations are not based on actually observing the economy’s recent performance. Rather, they used an economic model that was programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs — thus guaranteeing their result. Logicians call this the begging-the-question fallacy. Mathematicians call it assuming what you are trying to prove. The CBO model started by automatically...

This sentence, deep in the Washington Post’s coverage of the health-care summit, made me shake my head and be glad I’m not a congressional Democrat: The White House's best hope — perhaps its only hope — is that Obama can use a masterful performance during the six-hour appearance to "stiffen the spine" of congressional Democrats, one senior official said, persuading them to pass health-care legislation using the mechanism known as reconciliation, which requires a simple majority of 51 rather than 60 votes to prevail in the Senate. Great, they’ve ordered up another “masterful performance.” I expect copper prices to rise...

GREENSBORO — Gene Brown extended a job offer on Thursday to someone he hopes will be a member of Housing Greensboro’s tiny full-time staff. This person would oversee the nonprofit’s newest program — making minor repairs to the homes of the elderly or infirm. It was a job Brown might not have been able to create if not for federal stimulus funding and other donations. It’s a small — but concrete — example of a new job created with the help of the $700 billion-plus federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed by President Barack Obama a year ago last...

U.S. President Barack Obama says the massive economic stimulus bill he signed one year ago has prevented another Great Depression and kept millions of Americans working. The president is celebrating the anniversary of the bill's signing. President Obama says the $787 billion Recovery Act is working. "It is one of the main reasons the economy has gone from shrinking by six percent to growing by about six percent. And this morning we learned that manufacturing production posted a strong gain. So far, the Recovery Act is responsible for the jobs of about two million Americans who would otherwise be unemployed,"...

One Year After February 17 Signing Of Stimulus, 17 Numbers You Need To Know3.5 MILLION: Jobs Obama Promised Stimulus Would Create By End Of 2010. (President Barack Obama, Remarks At The Signing Of The American Recovery And Reinvestment Act, Press Release, Denver, CO, 2/17/09)3.3 MILLION: Jobs Lost Since Obama Made That Promise. (U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, Accessed 2/16/10) 6.8 MILLION: Jobs Obama Must Now Create To Keep Promise By End Of 2010. (President Barack Obama, Remarks At The Signing Of The American Recovery And Reinvestment Act, Press Release, Denver, CO, 2/17/09; U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, Accessed...

Lovely! It’s the 1 year anniversary of our stimulus bill. Having a year to look back and evaluate, I have come to the conclusion that the results would have been far more effectual if our elected swindlers decided to print $10 trillion dollars in $100 denominations, strapped it all to the space shuttle and released it about 45 seconds before hitting our atmosphere (give or take a few seconds). I’m no engineer and I don’t know how much that would weigh so perhaps $1,000 dollar Federal Reserve notes would be in order. For the obtuse, yes I am being deliberately...

By TERENCE CHEA SAN FRANCISCO – The nation's public schools are falling under severe financial stress as states slash education spending and drain federal stimulus money that staved off deep classroom cuts and widespread job losses. School districts have already suffered big budget cuts since the recession began two years ago, but experts say the cash crunch will get a lot worse as states run out of stimulus dollars. The result in many hard-hit districts: more teacher layoffs, larger class sizes, smaller paychecks, fewer electives and extracurricular activities, and decimated summer school programs. The situation is particularly ugly in California,...

President Obama has spent billions on so-called green job programs as part of the economic recovery and plans to spend billions more. He has repeatedly argued this will create good-paying jobs that cannot be outsourced. But, according to the green groups themselves, these jobs can be highly expensive, often costing well more than $100,000 per job in subsidies and/or tax credits. Just last month, the White House said it was spending $135,294 per job to create 17,000 green jobs. And research commissioned in part by the Sierra Club found that the jobs often pay less than the industry average and,...