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My reaction to the steady flow of news reports regarding what a failure the February 2009 Stimulus has been can be summed up as follows…

Thanks to Norlyn, I was provided with a more enjoyable and clever way to say…

“Duh!”

I recommend that the President, his many Czars, and the legions of pointy-headed central planners both in and out of the White House who drew up the Stimulus plan find something else to do for a living.

Perhaps THEY should line up for one of those “shovel ready” jobs we’d heard so much about…

Oops…guess that’s not going to happen.

I think Mr. Obama, et al, should try to make some money the old fashioned way – they need to obtain some skills or provide a good or service of value and see what the market will bear. Time to get out of the social engineering business.

I’m not buying the “golly gee, whiz, that didn’t work!” routine as seen in the “shovel-ready video”. On the one hand, the President openly admits the make-work projects he touted during the Stimulus debate weren’t so “shovel ready” after all, while on the other hand, the White House denies the Stimulus failed to “create jobs”.

Those “shovel ready” projects weren’t ready and so, shovel operators weren’t put to work. It’s simple and obvious. The Obama administration and it’s many protectors need to stop insulting our intelligence.

This article is the first of many articles we’ll be writing about the Stimulus, the economy, and how the Republicans have (or not) and are (or not) dealing with these issues.

Since news of the last week and a half has revealed important information about Stimulus jobs and the general lack thereof, that specific subject will be handled first.

On Sunday, July 3, Weekly Standard columnist Jeffrey H. Anderson released information based on White House economists’ Seventh Quarterly Report on the Stimulus plan. Anderson used the report’s calculations in noting that for every job that was “created or saved” (whatever that actually means), the cost to taxpayers was $278,000. Perhaps more condemning still:

“…the ‘stimulus’ has been working in reverse over the past six months, causing the economy to shed jobs.”

Obama's Spaghetti Defense…will it work?

Damning truths, those. But for the President and his administration, they cannot stand. So it was time to employ a spaghetti defense. Time will tell if any of the proverbial noodles stick.

First, the White House attacked Anderson’s analysis, with help from some in the media, saying Anderson had made mistakes in his calculations and that he had used the lowest numbers of projected jobs “created or saved” in an effort to make the numbers look as bad as possible. So Anderson followed up in an editorial on (of all places) the NPR website, going into even greater detail than his piece on July 3. The Stimulus plan only looks worse as a result.

Then, when this tactic failed to quiet the ruckus, White House spokesman Jake Carney attempted to distance the Administration from…it’s own economists’ analysis¹ citing figures from the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO?

There are, of course, multiple problems with this, including and beyond what is obvious to many of us. The obvious? CBO is not an entity that independently audits and analyzes legislation and issues reports that reflect objective, realistic truth, which could provide vital service in the legislative process. Instead, CBO is a cheerleading rubber stamp for whichever party is in power at the moment.  It’s important to understand it is precisely because Congress made it that way; it’s structured such that it must analyze information according to the exact parameters Congress puts in front of it regarding legislation. Analyses are done in the bizarro vacuum that is reality for D.C. politicians.

Hence the problem for the Obama administration. The quarterly reports on the Stimulus, “As part of the unprecedented accountability and transparency provisions included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)”, intentionally use methodologies which include multiple sources of information. Looking beyond CBO was an effort to bolster the credibility of the reports.

But, in order to avoid inconvenient truths, the White House has to discard all of the other sources of information and revert to the rubber stamp CBO.

The trouble with “unprecedented accountability and transparency” is that it, uh, sort of means that people can see right through to the failures of your policy, and, hmm, they sort of expect you to be accountable. It’s difficult to avoid when one crafts one’s own petard.

If cherry picking from available analyses does not silence critics, it’s time to make an effort to discredit based on pure partisan logic alone. So, Spokesman Carney noted that  the analysis was done by the Weekly Standard, which is well known to be a conservative publication…so…apparently, that means the information revealed should be given no consideration whatsoever. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

However, even if Anderson’s analysis is discarded, there are other sources that have come to the same, or even worse conclusions. Reuters is not exactly a conservative enclave. In a July 6th editorial written by James Pethokoukis (a fellow with a “balanced” resume), we find an even harsher view of the Stimulus, based on an analysis entirely separate from the Mr. Anderson’s:

“Elections have results. So do bad policies. Obama’s choices on taxing and spending and regulating, sorry to say, seem to have made things worse.”

Facts revealed by the Seventh Quarterly report immediately preceded a report on unemployment figures which only underlined the problems with the Stimulus as pertains to jobs.

A June report puts unemployment at 9.2% (see link above).

As shown in the chart below, the actual number of unemployed is even higher. See THIS ARTICLE for more “fun” charts and in depth explanation.

U6 – Broader Unemployment – Click to see more and read explanation

But the fact that the Stimulus plan has neither brought unemployment down to the projected 7% nor caused milk and honey to flow out of the Rocky Mountains where the bill was signed doesn’t surprise a lot of us. There was plenty of evidence available during the debate over the Stimulus that predicted exactly what has come to pass.

It’s quite simple…

Government cannot create jobs

but it can destroy them.

And it’s well past time we learned the lessons about make-work projects and government “job creation”.

Next up: How Republicans are losing this argument.