The stimulus failure

Washington Examiner Editorial:

President Obama’s much-ballyhooed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – the economic stimulus plan - isn’t stimulating much of anything except federal employment, despite having been rammed through Congress as emergency legislation in February. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the most recent Labor Department unemployment figures. Since the $787 billion spending measure was approved, 1.2 million Americans have lost their jobs and unemployment has ratcheted up to 8.9 percent – the highest it’s been since 1983. Unemployment is beyond even what President Barack Obama’s own economic advisors predicted it would be with no recovery plan – and definitely not what Americans were told to expect.

Meanwhile, spending touted as “timely, temporary and targeted” that was supposed to be flooding the economy is barely trickling out of the federal bureaucracy. Less than $29 billion – a mere four percent of the stimulus package– has been spent so far. So much for the “timely” part of the Obama mantra. Let’s not forget here that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were so hell-bent to get the bill through Congress that they refused to allow members sufficient time to read the massive 1,079-page spending bill before voting on it. One consequence was that the bill was stuffed with spending that is anything but temporary. So we can all wave goodbye to that part of the mantra.

Obama said on national television not long ago that the stimulus bill had “saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” But how can that be when joblessness increased a full percentage point after his stimulus package was passed? And there’s that uncomfortable fact uncovered by an Associated Press study that found that states hit hardest by the recession are getting the least amount of stimulus spending. There goes the targeted part of the mantra.

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"Savings jobs" is a term that cannot be quantified. That is probably why Obama chose that rather than "creating jobs." As time goes on it becomes more clear that the stimulus bill was just another example of Democrats not "wasting a crisis" to get their agenda through Congress. But, that agenda is not helping and is becoming another example of the failure of liberalism. A tax cut would have made a bigger difference and would have been a better investment.