It was during a January 10th radio address that President Barack Obama laid out the number one goal of his economic stimulus plan: Create 3 million new jobs in the next 24 months, with only 600,000 being government jobs.
So how's it working out?
Seven months after the passage of the Stimulus, a bill so important it had to be passed as quickly as possible, a massive 30,000 jobs have been created. The Heritage Foundation give us some perspective on those numbers, calculating the cost per job at $533,000. However, ABC's Jake Tapper reports that out of the money allotted by the federal government, $16 billion, only "$2.2 billion has actually gone to these contractors to create jobs," putting the cost per job at $72, 408.
Tapper's calculation was outright rejected by the White House. In fact, they put the number of jobs the stimulus has created at a million or more. Recovery Act spokeswoman Elizabeth Oxhorn explains this by stating “contract money doesn’t just go toward labor/wages for workers – it also funds things like purchase of equipment and supplies which also creates jobs.”
Sounds like trickle down stimulus to me.
Where are these jobs then? Jim Hoft points to Recovery.gov and shows Connecticut has created 20 and only spent a million dollars to do it. New Hampshire racked up 22 jobs and only spent $430,000 to do it. However, the federal government reports the stimulus has saved 250,000 education jobs. So, there is that.
Let's get serious. The only thing this administration has stimulated recently is Fox News' ratings. While Connecticut may have created 20 jobs, it lost close to 36,000. New Hampshire lost 12,000. In the time since the Stimulus Bill was passed, only one state has created jobs: North Dakota. The rest have lost 2.7 million collectively.
White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein calls this "quite positive" and says so far the result "exceeds our projections."
In fact, according to the left, the good times are just getting started. Supporters of the stimulus will tell you critics are jumping the gun because the money has yet to get rolling. However, that contradicts the testimony of Christina Romer, the Chair of the White House's Council of Economic Advisor's. Romer told Congress:
Christina Romer, the head of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, said Thursday that the $194 billion already spent gave a jolt to the economy that contributed to growth in the second and third quarters of the year.
She told a congressional panel that by the middle of next year, the impact of the stimulus will level off. Romer said spending so far has saved or created 600,000 to 1.5 million jobs but warned that unemployment will remain high, above 9.5 percent, through the end of 2010.
For the math junkies out there, Romer's numbers show jobs costing the taxpayer anywhere from $323,000 at the low end to $130,000 at the high end. Anyone out there get a new $130,000 jobs courtesy of the Stimulus Plan?
Close to three million jobs lost, but the government has created over a million? The Stimulus is just getting started but is getting ready to fizzle out? This is enough to make a person's head spin.
Regardless of what the White House or its sycophants in the media tell you, the Stimulus is not having a positive effect on employment. The people who are estimating the number of jobs saved or created are the same people who told us unemployment wouldn't exceed 8 percent if the Stimulus Bill passed. Today it is creeping up on 10 percent. These are the same people who, according to Vice President Joe Biden, underestimated the severity of the economic downturn.
Are we supposed to believe that while they "misread the severity" of the recession, the results of the Stimulus are still exceeding their expectations? Doesn't that make them complete incompetents? If things are going great, then doesn't it follow that they were initially spending far, far more money than they needed to spend? Or did they have it right from the get-go and Biden was just being Biden?
Or is it possible that the Stimulus is a failure and the administration is spinning everything so fast they could trip over each other's stories?
The numbers speak for themselves.
It's been seven months.
The budget deficit has quadrupled.
Over 2.7 million jobs have been lost.
The unemployment has risen from 7.6 percent in January to 9.8 percent today and we are told it isn't going to get better anytime soon.
And not a single cent of taxes have been cut. Except in North Dakota...the only state to grow jobs.
Duane Lester's Bio
Duane Lester is a former Navy journalist turned blogger and podcaster. He also writes at All American Blogger and hosts All American Radio on RFC Radio . You can follow him on Twitter at @bodhi1 .
Posted
10-26-2009 9:06 AM
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