Obama Stimulus Wreckovery Act: $111 Million ‘Saved’ Only 55 Jobs

Barry Hussein is such an unmitigated failure that it defies description.

But at least we can describe his porkulus record:

L.A.: $111M in Stimulus Saved Just 55 Jobs
By William Lajeunesse
Published September 17, 2010

More than a year after Congress approved $800 billion in stimulus funds, the Los Angeles city controller has released a 40-page report on how the city spent its share, and the results are not living up to expectations.

“I’m disappointed that we’ve only created or retained 55 jobs after receiving $111 million,” said Wendy Greuel, the city’s controller. “With our local unemployment rate over 12 percent we need to do a better job cutting red tape and putting Angelenos back to work.”

According to the audit, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works spent $70 million in stimulus funds — in return, it created seven private sector jobs and saved seven workers from layoffs. Taxpayer cost per job: $1.5 million.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation created even fewer jobs per dollar, spending $40 million but netting just nine jobs. Taxpayer cost per job: $4.4 million.

Greuel blamed the dismal numbers on several factors:

1. Bureaucratic red tape: Four highway projects did not even go out to bid until seven months after they were authorized.

2. Projects that were supposed to be competitively bid in the private sector went instead went to city workers.

3. Stimulus money was not properly tracked within departments

4. Both departments could not report the jobs created and retained in a timely fashion..

“I would say maybe in a grade, a B- in creating the jobs,” Greuel told Fox News. “They have started to spend those dollars but it took seven months to get some of those contracts out. We think in the city that we should move quickly and not in the same usual bureaucratic ways.”

But as we consider the debate over extending the Bush tax cuts for ALL Americans, one thing is obvious: the government is FAR better at “stimulating” private sector jobs than rich people who run millions of small and large businesses.  And if you don’t believe that, you’re a racist.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate has increased by more under Barry Hussein than under ANY president in FIFTY YEARS.  But you have to admit, he’s doing a really, REALLY good job creating poverty.

Please, please vote for Democrats this November.  Vote for the greatest economic disaster in American history.  Democrats have worked feverishly to implode America so that they can bring their Cloward and Piven strategy to fruition.  But they need more time to destroy the America that the hated founding fathers envisioned; and two more years ought to be enough for them to complete the “fundamental transformation” of America into their Marxist-fascist Utopia.

Remember, Americans, you are greedy and arrogant, just as Obama has been telling the world while he apologized for our depravity.  We deserve to suffer.  So please vote Democrat so our chickens can finally truly come home to roost once and for all.

Fact-Checking Obama’s Bogus Bullpuckey Stimulus Claims

Obama’s fearmongering Congress into rushing the stimulus through so fast that no one in Congress could even read it was utterly demagogic.  His continuous dishonest claims since about the “success” of this pork-ridden slush fund have been deceitful and despicable.

Obama doesn’t just lie, he tells giant lies.  Big Lies, to cite a phrase from history.

Here’s one of the Big Lies that Obama told during his stimulus anniversary media blitzkrieg:

“And economists from across the political spectrum warned that if dramatic action was not taken to break the back of the recession, the United States could spiral into another depression.”

But Obama’s claim that economists “across the political spectrum” had sided with him was an utterly contemptible lie a year ago, and it is an even bigger lie now.  Last February I preserved the following.  Please note the title:

With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

And there were a whopping load of economists who signed on to that statement – at least a couple hundred, just at a glance.

That’s 200 economists saying, “YOU LIE!”

The truth was rather this: “‘Economists across the Spectrum’ Continue to Flee Stimulus bill.”

Obama supporters provided exactly two names of conservatives whom they claimed constituted their “across the spectrum.”  Both claims were bogus.

Another Big Lie was the invention of the never-before-seen category of “saved or created” jobs.  It’s a load of rotting baloney.  Harvard economics Professor Gregory Mankiw has said, “There is no way to measure how many jobs are saved.” Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University has said “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” If George Bush had EVER tried to use this same “saved or created” category, he would have been simultaneously mocked as a fool and attacked as a criminal who was trying to deliberately deceive the American people.  But a liberal Democrat did it, so the mainstream media has merely duly reported the totally-made-up self-serving “statistic” as though it weren’t a frankly horrifying lie.

Now, according to a CBS/New York Times poll, only six percent of the people believe that the stimulus has actually created any jobs:

No matter what the truth is about the stimulus act, public perception is the real battle Democrats have to fight politically as 2010 elections loom. And they are fighting that battle hard, based on the amount of e-mail traffic and stimulus promoting events Democrats are holding across the country today. It’s not going to be easy based on a CBS News/New York Times poll released last week that showed just 6 percent of the American public thinks the stimulus created jobs. Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steele ran with that figure yesterday saying that more people believe that Elvis is still alive than believe the stimulus is working.

For the record, Michael Steele is correct: 7% believe that Elvis is alive.  About the same percentage who believe space aliens anally probed them, I imagine.

Unfortunately, that six percent largely consist of the mainstream media.

It’s nice to see someone in the media take him on over some of his claims, particularly an economist with the prestige of a John Lott.  He apparently limits his takedown to the content provided during one particular interview.  But it is still a devastating, point-by-point, presentation of an administration that could care less about the truth, or about reality:

Updated February 19, 2010
Fact Checking Team Obama’s Stimulus Claims
By John Lott
– FOXNews.com

A look at what the White House said about the stimulus and what they didn’t say…

On Wednesday, Fox News Channel’s Bill Hemmer interviewed Austan Goolsbee, the chief economist for the White House Recovery Board, on the one-year anniversary of the stimulus.

Here is a simple fact check of Mr. Goolsbee’s claims:

Hemmer: “What does the White House predict a year from now?”

Goolsbee: Let’s remember, you’re citing the claim that the unemployment rate wouldn’t go above 8 percent, but if you remember in that same projection they said that if we didn’t pass the stimulus it would only go to 9 percent, and it was above that before the stimulus even came into effect. What the administration and everyone else missed was the depth of the recession that was in place at the end of 2008 and at the beginning of 2009 when the President came into office.

In April, President Obama was busy touting the stimulus as having “already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” Press releases from the administration were already being sent out claiming saved jobs on April 1. Even well before that, on January 25, Lawrence Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser, promised that the benefits from the stimulus bill would be seen “within weeks” after passage. Yet, despite Mr. Goolsbee’s claim, the unemployment rate did not rise above 9 percent until May, well after these claimed jobs were supposedly being created.

As for the statement that the president was “surprised” by how bad the economy was, during his first radio address to the nation on Jan. 24, Obama claimed, “We begin this year and this administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action.” In Obama’s first national press conference he talked about the United States finding itself in a crisis *12 times* and also took pains to emphasize that it was an “unprecedented crisis.” Given that the unemployment rate in 1983 reached 10.7 percent, if the president believed that we were indeed in an “unprecedented crisis” or at least the worst shape since the Great Depression, it is hard to see how the unemployment numbers could surprise him or those on his team.

The Obama administration has frequently claimed that they didn’t realize how bad the GDP numbers for the 4th quarter 2008 were when their first unemployment predictions were released, but the February 28 estimates were released well after the GDP numbers were out.

Mr. Goolsbee states that the economy was worse than he expected it to be. But there is another alternative explanation and that is that the stimulus created higher unemployment. In fact, my columns in this space predicted that during at the beginning of February 2009 that would be the case. Moving around a trillion dollars from areas where people would have spent it to areas where the government wants to spend it will move a lot of jobs away from those firms that are losing the money to those who are now favored by the government. Since people won’t instantly move from one job to another, there will be a temporary increase in unemployment.

But there’s still more. Here’s this from Hemmer’s interview:

Hemmer: “So you are saying that you are standing by the numbers and you guys were right all along.”

Goolsbee: What I’m saying is that the impact of the stimulus is very much what they predicted it to be. What they missed — and what everyone missed — was the depth of the baseline that was in place as the president came into office, yes.

Two graphs illustrate Obama’s promises versus what actually happened. Whether one uses the president’s predictions when he came into office or his later predictions as provided on February 28, the actual unemployment rate lies well above either of those predictions.

See the figure here.

If one looks at both the number of people unemployed and the number who have left the labor force, “I can’t see any [employment] benefit from the stimulus,” Professor Stephen Bronars, a labor economist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me.

See the figure here.

And then there’s this from Hemmer’s interview with Goolsbee:

Hemmer: [What if you] Use the unspent stimulus of $514 billion to pay down the national debt?

Goolsbee: Well, Bill, I got to tell you when the people who burned down the back half of the house are complaining about how much it costs to rebuild it, I think we’re in a bit of a strange spot. As you know, the deficit was projected, before the president took office, to be $1.3 trillion, and that’s because we were teetering on the edge of a depression and we needed to put the focus — as we did — on getting us away from the abyss. If we hadn’t done that the deficit would be catastrophically worse even than it is this year and than it was projected to be when the president came in. We should not reverse the second half of the stimulus. It’s needed to get us out of the woods. Look out the window, the unemployment rate is near 10 percent. Now, the stimulus was never capable of restoring the 8 million jobs hole that was created by the recession beginning in 2007. It did part of it and the private sector needs to the rest.

During the middle of October, 2008, after the bailout bill had been passed, then-Senator Obama claimed (during the third presidential debate): “we are now looking at a deficit of well over half a trillion dollars.” Virtually all of the huge 2009 budget deficit of $1.4 trillion has been blamed on the Bush administration — as if Mr. Obama’s $862 billion stimulus (over two years) and his $410 billion supplemental spending bill in March had nothing to do with it. Mr. Obama also asked for $350 billion in TARP money to be released by the Bush administration immediately before he entered the White House. Bush had no plans to spend that money, but, by releasing it before he took office, Mr. Obama is able to claim that the spending should be counted towards the Bush administration.

Then there was this:

Hemmer pointed out that the White House is starting a pushing to focus on the deficit. Isn’t that a contradiction from this administration?

Here’s the response:

Goolsbee: [No.] Because you’re getting confused between the short term and the long term. What we need is to put a focus on deficit reduction in the long term. Everyone agrees with that, [and] the president wants to put a focus [on it]. The reason the budget commission failed, as you know, is because 7 Republicans that sponsored the bill turned around and voted against it when it became clear it was going to pass.

Actually, it isn’t clear how the administration can blame Republicans for the defeat of the budget commission. Democrats controlled 60 seats in the Senate at the time, and they could have approved the commission without a single Republican vote. Sixteen Republicans did vote for the commission (along with 37 Democrats), but 23 Democrats and 23 Republicans voted against the commission. The Republicans voted against it because they worried that the commission would rely heavily on new — and higher — taxes to reduce the deficit.

This came next…

Hemmer noted that a new CBS News/New York Times poll shows that only 6 percent of Americans think that the stimulus has created jobs and 48 percent think that it will never create jobs.

Goolsbee: Well, look, that may be true. I’m just a policy guy. I’m not an expert on spinning and convincing. What I would say is if you go get the data from the private sector forecasters, from the non-partisan congressional budget, or you look at Recovery.gov or the reports coming out of the Council of Economic Advisers, you see they are all hovering around the creating or saving of 2 million jobs thus far. And so the key is [that] the hole was extremely deep. This brought us part of the way up out of this abyss hole. But we need to do more. The president has never said that this is sufficient.

It is a bit of an exaggeration that everyone is in agreement with these claims. Cary Leahey, an economist and senior managing director with Decision Economics, one of the forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal, provided me with one explanation for why the stimulus increased unemployment: “With transitional moves in government spending [from the stimulus], there will be dislocations in the economy that will lead to higher unemployment.” But he emphasized that he thought those effects would be “short-lived, six to nine months, definitely not more than a year.” Of the other three sources, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, or if you look at recovery.gov or the reports coming out of the Council of Economic Advisers, all are controlled by Democrats.

Then there was this…

Hemmer raised the point that only two places in the country have gained jobs during the last year: North Dakota and Washington, D.C.

Goolsbee: Well, certainly, if they’re going to be treated to the kind of rationale that you’re describing, it’s going to be very tough. But if you look at what, as I’m trying to describe, the recession began in 2007 – 8 million jobs were lost. If you restore 2 million jobs, that’s 2 million people who are at work, who would have been out of work had we not done that. But that doesn’t fill the entire 8 million hole. And so for you to say they only created jobs in North Dakota, you’re making the mistake of saying, well, the stimulus should have created more than 8 million jobs or else it didn’t have an impact. But that’s just logically incorrect.

Mr. Goolsbee simply isn’t answering Hemmer’s question. Hemmer was asking about the change in jobs since the beginning of last year to evaluate the impact of the stimulus, while Goolsbee is also discussing job losses from the end of 2007. There was nothing “logically incorrect” with Hemmer’s question.

There is also a simple math error in Mr. Goolsbee’s statement. He claims that things would have been even worse than the 8 million drop in jobs if the stimulus hadn’t been passed. What he may have meant to say is that without the stimulus 10 million jobs would have been lost (the 8 million that were lost plus the 2 million that were saved by the stimulus and would have been lost without it). But if the Obama administration really believes this, the unemployment rate in January would have been 11 percent, not 9.7 percent, and the Obama administration never predicted that the unemployment rate would go to 11 percent without the stimulus.

In any case, Goolsbee’s reluctance to explain why jobs, since the beginning of last year, have only increased in the District Columbia, where a lot of government jobs have been created, and North Dakota is understandable.

John R. Lott, Jr. is a FoxNews.com contributor. He is an economist and author of “Freedomnomics.”

The first article that Lott linked to in the link titled “” has the following graph.  I leave you with it, as it pretty much shows at a glance just what a whopping load of failure Obama’s trillion dollar stimulus truly was:

Obama Reveals His Porkulus Was Bogus In His Own Bogus Claims

Pardon my language, but the Obama stimulus bill was crap.  It hasn’t produced squat.  It was a gigantic $3.27 trillion socialist spending giveaway that has rightly been called “the Generational Theft Act of 2009.”

First we had Barack Obama, then Joe Biden, falsely claiming that they had the porkulus plan had created or “saved” 150,000 jobs.  There is no proof that any such number of jobs have been created (the figure is actually merely an estimate of what Obama’s own economic advisers say they think the stimulus bill is doing, and not based on any evidence whatsoever of its actual effects).  And for what it’s worth, I can claim that I “saved” 150,000 jobs – and you just try to prove that I didn’t.

Any rational human being has to mock Obama for claiming he “created or saved” jobs.  The national media would NEVER have allowed George Bush to get away with such pinheaded partisan polemics.  By contrast, the mainstream media wouldn’t even allow Bush to claim he kept America safe in spite of the obvious fact that he clearly did.  Even five years after 9/11, fully two-thirds of New Yorkers said they were still “very concerned” about another terrorist attack on the city.  Everybody thought we’d be attacked by terrorists again.  Bush kept the American people safe by carrying the fight to the enemy on foreign soil.  Yet the media that has blithely allowed Obama to claim he “saved” jobs has bitterly resisted allowing Bush to claim he “saved” lives.

Obama’s arguments that the stimulus worked have increasingly come to sound like Hitler’s claims that the invasion of the Soviet Union worked.

Among other problems is the fact that only 3% of the stimulus funds have been actually spent so far, which precludes it as a factor in any discussion of “economic recovery.”  Particularly when the states and regions that were hardest hit by the bad economic conditions didn’t even get any money.  And please don’t forget that conservative predicted that the funds wouldn’t go out fast enough to make any difference in any short-term economic recovery, and complained that the people weren’t given enough time to pass a better bill.  Congressional Democrats didn’t even read the bill that they rushed through the process.

Obama’s own rhetoric proves how terribly flawed his arguments and ideas were.

Obama promised Caterpillar workers in Peoria, Illinois that laid-off workers would be rehired if his “Death to America Act” (aka his stimulus bill) passed.   Not only was that a complete fabrication, but 2,400 additional workers have been laid off since the passage of porkulus.

But now there’s an even BIGGER bogus ‘Bama baloney claim that has been utterly refuted by actual reality.  In a March 7 speech in Columbus, Ohio, Obama said the following:

Now there were those — there were those who argued that our recovery plan was unwise and unnecessary. They opposed the very notion that government has a role in ending the cycle of job loss at the heart of this recession. There are those who believe that all we can do is repeat the very same policies that led us here in the first place. […]

So for those who still doubt the wisdom of our recovery plan, I ask them to talk to the teachers who are still able to teach our children because we passed this plan. I ask them to talk to the nurses who are still able to care for our sick, and the firefighters and first responders who will still be able to keep our communities safe. I ask them to come to Ohio and meet the 25 men and women who will soon be protecting the streets of Columbus because we passed this plan. (Applause.) I look at these young men and women, I look into their eyes and I see their badges today and I know we did the right thing.

These jobs and the jobs of so many other police officers and teachers and firefighters all across Ohio will now be saved because of this recovery plan -– a plan that will also create jobs in every corner of this state. Last week, we announced that Ohio would receive $128 million that will put people to work renovating and rebuilding affordable housing. (Applause.) On Tuesday — on Tuesday I announced that we’d be sending another $935 million to Ohio that will create jobs rebuilding our roads, our bridges, and our highways. (Applause.) And yesterday, Vice President Biden announced $180 million for this state that will go towards expanding mass transit and buying fuel-efficient buses -– money that will be putting people to work, getting people to work. (Applause.)

Altogether, this recovery plan will save and create over three and a half million American jobs over the next two years.

Well, what has happened since the applause lines?  What has happened since the Teleprompter of the United States was packed up and hauled away?

The AP article covering the event noted that Obama “suggested that critics talk to 25 police recruits in Ohio’s capital city who owe their jobs to stimulus spending and ‘talk to the teachers who are still able to teach our children because we passed this plan.’”  It also described how “Obama touted the 114th police recruit class as proof that the stimulus plan, which drew scant Republican support in Congress, is paying dividends.”

That article also presented the Republican prediction that the stimulus would be a failure, and why it would be a failure.  The very last sentence in the article says:

Breann Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Rep. Pat Tiberi, one of eight Ohio Republicans who voted against the stimulus, noted that the money that saved the recruits’ jobs will run out next year. [Columbus Mayor] Coleman hasn’t said how he’ll pay the officers’ salaries after that.

Look what has happened since:

Without tax increase, 300 police officers to be laid off
By Robert Vitale  May 26, 2009   THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Nearly 300 Columbus police officers – 17 percent of the force – will be laid off next year if voters don’t approve an income-tax increase on Aug. 4, Columbus Police Chief Walter Distelzweig said this morning.

“If we receive additional revenue, these cuts would not be made,” Distelzweig said.

The 2010 budget plan he unveiled this morning is based on revenue projections without the proposed tax increase. The Police Division would shrink by 324 officers, with 297 layoffs and 27 retirements, according to the chief.

If the cuts happen, the division would have fewer officers than in any year since 1993. Columbus had 91,000 fewer residents then.

Potential layoffs would affect the 25 recruits whose class was saved by federal stimulus money this year. Officers hired during the past four years likely would lose their jobs, Distelzweig said.

And I’d be willing to bet the jobs of all the firefighters and nurses and teachers Obama talked all that smack about are in the same boat.

In other words, Obama created 25 jobs and saved about 300 others – until they were told to expect their pink slips less than 3 months later.  And it only cost $3.27 trillion dollars.  There’s your tax dollars at work.

How is it that jobs that have already been “saved” by Obama’s gargantuan stimulus plan now have to be “saved” again by a massive state tax increase?

About the only jobs that are being created by porkulus seem to be making the road signs that falsely advertise currently nonexistent construction projects.

We’ve also learned the poor are getting poorer under Obama’s “stimulus.”

Obama’s stimulus was based on bogus and failed economic theory that won’t work.  The President of the European Union has called Obama’s plan “the road to hell” and argued that it “will undermine the stability of the global financial market.”  China’s Director General of the Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission has expressed fear that Obama would
“devalue not only your [US] currency but the currencies throughout the world.”  Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned Obama about his country’s own failed experiment with socialism and urged against “excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence.” And “analysts are increasingly concerned about the Treasury’s ability to fund costly economic rescue measures that are expected to drive this year’s budget deficit to $1.75 trillion.”

Don’t take my word for it that the stimulus was the gargantuan fraud that Republicans claimed it would be; just look at what Obama promised would happen, versus what actually HAS happened.