Remember When . . .

Just a few short months ago, when only ten percent of the Generational Theft Act (Stimulus) money had been spent, the administration proclaimed that the stimulus was working and the recession was over. In fact, in June of this year, Joe Biden went so far as to say that the stimulus worked "better than we expected."

I guess, the administration wants you to forget those "good old days" of the end of the recession.

Today, at his "jobs summit" (which included no groups of people that actually create jobs), Obama bemoaned that we are in a "weak recovery" and that the stimulus "hasn't worked as well as we expected."

The administration is using the lack of progress in the economic recovery to (again) push for a second stimulus . . . I mean to push for a "jobs creation" bill, that would spend billions more dollars on everything except actually creating jobs.

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Pelosi: Deficit Tripled and We're Not Getting Anything For It

GATEWAY PUNDIT reports...

Nancy Pelosi told leftist supporters today that the the reason Americans are mad about their record spending is that “they’re not getting anything for it.”

And, that’s why she wants a new Stimulus Bill!

FOX News reported, via Ace:

Building the case for a brand new jobs-creation bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says most Americans would not mind inflating the already-gaping deficit in exchange for more jobs.

The California Democrat said on a conference call Tuesday that Americans could “absorb” the hit to the federal budget, and she argued that their biggest complaint is not that the deficit is big — it’s that they’re not seeing any benefit in return for increasing the U.S. debt load.

Despite the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February, unemployment climbed to 10.2 percent in October. While critics cite the jobless rate as a sign that the stimulus has failed, Pelosi argues that the federal government is just not trying hard enough.

“We have to shed any weakness that anybody may have about not wanting to be confrontational on this subject for fear that we’d be labeled not sensitive to the deficit,” Pelosi said, in a recording posted by Think Progress.

“The American people have an anger about the growth of the deficit because they’re not getting anything for it.”

So now they want to do it all over again.

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Jobs Saved? One.

Obama is claiming he has saved hundreds of thousands of jobs during what they continue to call the worst economic climate in our lifetime. Putting aside the fact that the Carter years, and a couple that immediately followed Carter were probably worse (but may not be before this is over), Obama is doing a good job of ensuring that we top the Carter years and possibly even the Great Depression of the '30's with his departure from common sense economics.

We now have a definition of a "saved job" according to the administration. Obama claims to have saved over 14,500 jobs in one federal office. Quite a feat. It turns out, however, that 9,300 of those were counted as a saved job based on the fact that the federal employees were given a pay raise. Luis Rosero, HHS spokesman said "If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job." Hence, some of these outrageous numbers we are seeing and which fly in the face of all reason given the continuing rise in the unemployment rate, are due to people who would not have lost their jobs getting pay raises.

Let me repeat that: If you would have kept your job regardless of anything the administration has done concerning the economy and if you got a pay raise, Obama saved your job.

Based on that definition, I wonder how many jobs Bush saved or created during his eight years in office. Oh wait.... that doesn't count.

The reality is that Obama hasn't saved or created very many jobs at all. In fact, if you offset every job that may have been saved or created by the stimulus package with the ones that were lost because of Obama's policies (based on his own claim that the unemployment rate would have topped out at 8.2 percent had we done nothing) we have a net loss of several MILLION jobs.

There is one job he has definitely saved, though. Just one that he can point to and say that "This person now has a job and wouldn't have if not for my administration." That would be the job of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The former governor of Kansas left the State in such horrible shape that her successor had to make an announcement yesterday that the state was making several millions of dollars in budget cuts. This makes four consecutive years that the State budget has had to be cut because of declining revenues. To make matters "worse," that announcement had to be made by a Democrat Governor. In other words things are in such a mess in the State of Kansas that a LIBERAL DEMOCRAT GOVERNOR IS MAKING BUDGET CUTS!!!

There is no doubt that Kathleen Sebelius would have been voted out of office (if she ran again in 2010) in the State of Kansas. There is also no doubt that the challengers that are emerging on the Republican side are much stronger candidates than any she actually faced when she did run for office in the state.

Clearly one of the reasons Obama picked Sebelius to be the HHS Secretary is so that she wouldn't be out of a job in 2010.

Good job, Obama. One job saved. Put THAT on recovery.gov.

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Stimulus At Work, Jobs Created in Non-Existent Places

I must tip my hat and congratulate this administration. They've done what no conservative would have been able to do.

A few weeks ago, they created more jobs than even existed in a number of school districts. Districts reported that the Generational Theft Act of 2009 "saved" five-, six- or seven-hundred jobs in districts that only employed two or three hundred people. Miraculous!

Now, they've gone a step further. The Washington Times in this article is reporting that the stimulus has now created jobs in school districts that don't exist and has created school districts in Congressional districts that don't exist.

Who would have thought.

Of course, some of this is explained away by reporting errors, but given the thousands of reporting errors that would have to be made, and the tens of thousands of jobs (if not hundreds of thousands), a couple of questions have to be asked:

First, is the administration making some of these "errors" intentionally to inflate the numbers? (I don't think there's any question but what that is taking place.)

Second, is some of the Stimulus money (perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars) being diverted? While there is no evidence, given the false reporting going on, I strongly suspect that stimulus dollars are ending up in the pockets of Timothy "Turbo Tax" Geithner, Kathleen Sebelius, and some of the other Administration officials that have a tendency to "hide" large chunks of income in order to not have to pay taxes on it. What better place to hide it?

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Stimulus Jobs Don't Add Up

Hey Illinois teachers, how is the stimulus working out for you? Bob Secter and Erika Slife of theChicago Tribune give you a report from the field.

More than $4.7 million in federal stimulus aid so far has been funneled to schools in North Chicago, and state and federal officials say that money has saved the jobs of 473 teachers.

Problem is, the district employs only 290 teachers.

(snip)

In the official report, Wilmette Public Schools District 39 was credited with 166 jobs saved by stimulus aid. Superintendent Raymond Lechner said the number should be zero.

At Dolton-Riverdale School District 148, stimulus funds were said to have saved the equivalent of 382 full-time teaching jobs -- 142 more than the district actually has.

A similar discrepancy was found in data for Kankakee School District 111, where the stimulus report logged the equivalent of 665 full-time jobs saved. "That's impossible," a top Kankakee school official said, adding that the entire payroll -- full and part time -- is 600 workers.

(snip)

Last spring, Dolton-Riverdale received $3.6 million in stimulus money and reported to the state that the money saved 181 teaching jobs. A follow-up report this fall on another installment of $750,000 brought the total to 201. The official state report states that stimulus money saved 382 jobs.

And no, this wasn't even deliberate fraud, not even in Illinois. Rather

Problems with the Illinois stimulus data illustrate how difficult it is to benchmark the impact of so sprawling an initiative. Many districts were unclear about what they should report. And there also may have been confusion over how the data were collated once the figures arrived at the state level.

And so it goes throughout the country with all types of jobs allegedly saved by the stimulus; not just teachers, not just Illinois. The following summary by a school superintendent applies to all stimulus jobs; about the only continuity in them will be the next generational debt to pay for them.

Just a handful of the jobs were new, Rafferty said, and he warned that every position propped up by stimulus money would be in jeopardy when the program expires. "Unless there's a guarantee of continuation of (federal or state) money, the vast majority of these will be eliminated because there won't be local resources to fund them," he said.

UPDATE: I wonder if all the new teachers being hired are needed to teach schoolchildren all the new "Barack Obama Praise Hymns" that seem to be so popular these days.

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Obama's Reputation On the Line Tomorrow

Yes, it's 2009, an odd-year, but there are a handful of elections happening tomorrow, and they'll be watched very closely, since they're the first ones since Obama's election last year.

The big ones: The Virgina governorship, the New Jersey governorship, and the NY-23 Congressional district. In New Jersey, it looks like voters might be ready to throw out ex-Goldmanite Jon Corzine, due to anger about higher taxes and the weak economy. But a third-party run from Chris Daggett may keep him in office.

The one that would really be a blow to Democrats is in Virginia, where it looks as though Republican Bob McDonnell will beat Democrat Creigh Deeds. Why a big deal? Because Virginia has been trending blue, and thus would mark a decisive reversal of that trend.

Suddenly it seems like Republicans have some life and voter enthusiasm. Remember just a few months ago when there were questions about whether it would ever be a serious party again?

Of course, this has very little to do with the Republican party and more to do with independent and conservative voters being very unhappy with the direction Obama is taking us. Voters aren't jumping onto the Republican bandwagon ... not just yet, anyway. They are, however, willing to vote republican to slow down the march toward socialism.

The Republicans still have a long way to go before they can capture the imaginations of voters with their own ideas. A good start would be a strong move to the right, particularly on fiscal issues. Americans are concerned about the National Debt and about the economy.

The current recession is still Bush's fault, all inherited from the "previous administration" according to the White House. That theme was echoed again Friday in a speech by V.P. Joe Biden, defending the one million, no wait, the 30,000, no wait, the 20,000 jobs created by the Stimulus package. As the recession drags on (and it is dragging on, in spite of some good news on Wall Street), Americans are beginning to see the disastrous toll that the administration's policies are having on businesses, particularly small businesses.

While Obama is willing to throw money at the economy, he is unwilling to establish pro-business policies, and until that happens, it is unlikely we'll see a strong rebound like we have following past recessions.

This may be an off year, for elections, but unless things change, and unless they change a lot, expect huge gains by Republicans in 2010.

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Yesterday, Fox; Today, Associated Press

Showing no shame, the Obama administration today slammed a report from The Associated Press alleging the government had overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under President Obama's $787 billion recovery program.

The White House seized on an initial report from a government oversight board weeks ago that claimed federal contracts awarded to businesses under the recovery plan already had helped pay for more than 30,000 jobs. The administration said the number was evidence that the stimulus program had exceeded early expectations toward reaching the president's promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

But the 30,000 figure is overstated by thousands -- at the very least by nearly 5,000, or one in six, based on AP's limited review of some of the contracts -- because some federal agencies and recipients of the money provided incorrect job counts. The review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs were credited to stimulus spending when, in fact, none were produced.

Within minutes of the publication of AP's story, the White House released a statement at 12:15 a.m. Thursday that it said was the "real facts" about how jobs were counted in the stimulus data distributed two weeks ago.

"This story draws misleading conclusions from a handful of examples," Ed DeSeve, an Obama adviser helping to oversee the stimulus program, said.

"Tomorrow, more than 100,000 recipient reports will be posted on Recovery.gov," DeSeve said. "Unlike the small number of reports reviewed by AP, these reports have been reviewed for weeks, errors have been spotted and corrected, and additional layers of review by state and local governments have further improved the data quality."

Nevertheless, the White House said it is aware there are problems. In an interview, the advisor said agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. It asserted that had been a test run of a small subset of data that had been subjected only to three days of reviews, that it had already corrected "virtually all" the mistakes identified by the AP and that the discovery of mistakes "does not provide a statistically significant indication of the quality of the full reporting that will come on Friday."

"If there's an error that was made, let's get it fixed," DeSeve said.

There's no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report, but the administration embraced the flawed figures the moment they were released.

The data partially reviewed by the AP for errors included all the data presently available, representing all known federal contracts awarded to businesses under the stimulus program. The figures being released Friday include different categories of stimulus spending by state governments, housing authorities, nonprofit groups and other organizations.

As of early Thursday, on its recovery.org Web site, the government was still citing 30,383 as the actual number of jobs linked so far to stimulus spending, despite the mistakes the White House has now acknowledged and said were being corrected.

A Colorado company said it created 4,231 jobs with the help of Obama's economic recovery plan. The real number: fewer than 1,000.

A child care center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with the help of stimulus money. Instead, it gave pay raises to its existing employees.

Elsewhere in the U.S., some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four or even more times.

The discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of a key benchmark the administration uses to gauge the success of the stimulus. The errors could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is released. It is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

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The Cost of Cash for Clunkers

Edmunds.com has crunched the numbers, and according to their math, the Cash for Clunkers program cost the U.S. taxpayer $24,000 for each new car sold that would not have been sold without the program.

Granted, the math involves some guesswork. Defenders of the program will argue with the way Edmunds calculated the cost by taking out cars sold that would have been sold without the program.

Edmund's argument, and it's a valid one, is that the program was designed to stimulate sales. It was part of the "Stimulus Package," after all. Therefore, any sales that would have been made without the program should count as "Stimulus."

The logic make sense to me. What that means is that most of the cars sold under the program would have been sold whether the "Cash for Clunkers" program had been in place or not. In fact, about 5 out of 6 cars would have been sold anyway. That means that one in 6 cars sold under the program were actually generated by the program and not the need for a new car.

Those numbers are estimates, of course. Nobody can be 100% sure of the actual numbers, but by looking at sales immediately before and immediately after the program, the estimates should be fairly accurate.

The bottom line is that for ever sale generated by the program itself, the cost to the U.S. taxpayer was nearly the cost of a typical new car. They could have just given them away.

. . . And who put these geniuses in charge?

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Stimulus Saved 30,000 Jobs

The first direct stimulus reports showed that stimulus contracts saved or created just 30,083 jobs, prompting more Republican criticism of the$787 billion package.

The data posted Thursday was the result of the government's initial attempt at counting actual stimulus jobs. Obama administration officials stressed that data was partial -- it represented just $16 billion out of the $339 billion awarded -- but they said it exceeded their projections.

"All signs -- from private estimates to this fragmentary data -- point to the conclusion that the Recovery Act did indeed create or save about 1 million jobs in its first seven months, a much needed lift in a very difficult period for our economy," said Jared Bernstein, the chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden.

So, thirty thousand equals one million, according to Biden. These are the same guys who are telling us that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit and save us money.

I didn't make this up.

.... really.

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Biden:The Stimulus Is Working

VP Joe Biden defended the Generational Theft Act today saying "The recovery act has played a significant role in changing the trajectory of our economy, and changing the conversation in the country. Instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we are talking about the end of a recession."

Biden, of course, is a moron.

Let's put aside the fact that the administration has been claiming that the "Stimulus Is Working" since last April. Even today, only about 10% of the stimulus has been spent, and if you look at how much of it was spent, there is no way you can credit whatever improvements in the economy that have occurred on the stimulus. It simply isn't logical.

In fact, most economists are now saying that the bottom of the recession occurred in late February. Remember when the stimulus was signed? That's right. The turn around occurred BEFORE A DIME HAD BEEN SPENT.

Furthermore, the purpose (at the time) of the stimulus was to create jobs. Yet, that is the one area in which the economy is not recovering. The stock market has stabilized and begun moving upwards. The housing decline has also stabilized in many areas. But unemployment continues to rise in most parts of the country. Economists are still predicting the unemployment rate to top 10% for the first time since the Carter administration by the end of this year.

Still, this is the mantra of the administration. They have to get this message out. One of the biggest reasons that Obama's poll numbers have continued to fall is that the American people are concerned about government spending. If the administration can make everyone believe that their spending is fixing things, they think the poll numbers will come back up. And as far as that goes, they are probably right.

Just wait, however, until the impending inflation kicks in.

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More: Your Tax Dollars At Work Stimulating The Economy

Perhaps you've noticed the unemployment rate rising as stimulus dollars continue to go out the government door. How can this be? Weren't those stimulus dollars all supposed to be going to "shovel-ready" projects? No, wait. They were supposed to be going to local and state governments to keep them from laying off teachers and law enforcement personnel.

Where else is it going?

The Social Security Administration admitted today that 1,700 check were mistakenly sent to inmates who were ineligible to receive benefits. While this glitch is only hitting the media today, apparently the error was discovered some time ago.

The Boston Herald reported that the administration is asking for the Massachusetts money back (among other states). But Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman with the Massachusetts Dept. of Corrections said that her department tried to alert the Social Security staff months ago when it first discovered the checks had been sent to 23 inmates who were ineligible for any benefits. "It was the DOC's opinion that the inmates were not eligible for the payments ...., and we withheld the checks from the inmates at that time and immediately contacted the federal Social Security Administration," she said.

But the administration failed to provide a directive despite several requests, so the department could no longer withhold the checks from the inmates.

No doubt, that stimulus money has been spent on drugs, payments for "hits," cigarettes, bribes, and who knows what else.

While the amounts and the number of checks in this specific instance are relatively small in the large scheme of things, these sorts of SNAFUs seem to be repeated over and over. The more people investigate where are taxpayer dollars are going, the more it is clear that much of the money is being spent unwisely, and in many cases being diverted to people and causes it was never intended for, often going to recipients who have no legal right to any of the funds.

If those same stimulus dollars had been simply divided evenly and sent to every taxpaying American citizen, the effect probably would have been more pronounced and more positive.

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Your Stimulus Tax Dollars are Stimulating More than the Economy

WARNING: The following post is for Adults only and will probably turn your stomach.

I've never been a fan of using federal dollars to fund art. In my opinion, if art is good, it will be commercially successful without government funding. If it isn't, it shouldn't be funded.

The National Endowment for the Arts received $80 million of the government's trillion dollar stimulus package. That money has been used for things such as the weekly pervert revue at the "Frameline" film house. Every week, this "art-oriented" theater shows a film that most of us would find not simply disturbing, but downright disgusting. Tax dollars also fund the weekly production "Perverts Put Out" at San Francisco's CounterPULSE, who invites guests to join in the "explicit, twisted fun." CounterPULSE received government funds in the "dance" category.

These aren't isolated incidents, either. While there are no statistics, it seems that much of the money going to "art and culture" (not all of which goes through the National Endowment for the Arts, and accounts for much more than the $80 million that the NEA received from the Generational Theft Act) goes to "projects" and "artistic endeavors" that the average American would find objectionable.

The Symmetry Project is a dance that depicts the "sharing of a central axis: spine, mouth and genitals" and celebrates their interconnectedness.

Liberals would jump and scream if a single tax dollar were to fund a church service or a prayer meeting. But these same people have no problem at all using dollars meant to stimulate the economy to stimulate the senses of the perverted citizens of San Francisco.

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Generational Theft Act Not Designed to Bring Recovery

They've been hinting at this for several days, but apparently it's now "official." The $787 Billion "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" (AARA) was not designed for full economic recovery, but rather to "stabilize" the downturn. That's the word from White House officials today, who held off-camera briefings with reporters.

What I want to know is, if it wasn't meant to stimulate economic recovery, why is it called the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act"? And why is the website called recovery.gov?

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