http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/5985-obama-biden-claim-stimulus-is-workingA statement released by the office of the White House Press Secretary on February 17 — the one-year anniversary of the federal government’s “stimulus” program — asserted: “One year in, the Recovery Act is at work across the country creating jobs and driving economic growth.”
The White House statement claimed that the program (officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act):
• “Is already responsible for as many as 2.4 million jobs through the end of 2009.”;
• “In the fourth quarter of 2009, the economy grew 5.7 percent — the largest gain in six years and something many economists say is largely due to the Recovery Act. Before the Recovery Act, the economy was shrinking by about 6 percent,” and that
• “Job losses for the fourth quarter of 2009 were one-seventh what they were in the first quarter of 2009 when the Recovery Act was passed.”
Earlier on the 17th, according to Fox News, in an interview broadcast on CBS's "The Early Show," Vice President Joe Biden asserted that taxpayers have "gotten their money's worth" out of the $787 billion stimulus program that Congress passed one year ago. Biden defended the stimulus program against accusations by critics that it hasn't succeeded in creating jobs as the administration promised to the American people.
But Biden maintained that the federal money spent in both private and public-sector initiatives has saved as many as 2 million jobs, and said, "I don't think [the program’s critics] realize it." Biden said that the year-old program was designed to be implemented in two stages, saying "we've only been halfway through the act."
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele called the Obama administration’s two-million job estimate "nonsense." He told Fox News: "I don't know what that is. I don't know what that looks like. If I can't put my fingers on it, if I can't touch it and if I can't get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and go to work there, then it's not happening, and that's the reality of a lot of people right now."
Another Fox News report noted that, despite the Administration’s claims:
The United States of America owes $1.6 trillion more today than it did a year ago. The jobless rate has climbed from 8.1 percent to 9.7 percent. And the deficit has soared to record levels, with another record likely to be set this year.
In reaction to administration claims, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, said in a statement: "Self-congratulatory 'stimulus' spin from this administration is hopelessly out of touch with reality and has about as much credibility as prior claims that unemployment wouldn't exceed 8 percent or that jobs would be created 'immediately'."
As for the American public, a New York Times/CBS News poll released on February 17 indicated that only 6 percent of Americans believe the government plan has created any jobs, with 48 percent thinking it won't, a number higher than reported late last year.
In reaction to some of the unfavorable comments made about the so-called stimulus program, an Obama administration spokeswoman and a top adviser to the president, Valerie Jarrett, made a statement in an interview with Reuters news service that was either as duplicitous as propaganda issued by the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984 or a vain attempt to emulate the fictional Pollyanna’s “Glad Game,” but we cannot decide which:
"It's hard to get out positive news stories when people tend to focus on what's going wrong as opposed to what's going well."
Incredible!
Ms. Jarrett’s protestations aside, there has been plenty of wrong to focus on since the stimulus program has been put into effect. In his article for The New American online for January 11, “Stimulus Funding Failed to Create Jobs,” Bruce Walker cited an economic analysis conducted by the Associated Press that was commissioned to five different economists at five different universities who used U.S. Department of Transportation and U.S. Department of Commerce data in their studies. The economists found that “of the $21 billion in stimulus funds for transportation construction projects, the impact upon unemployment was negligible.”
Walker observes:
One of those economists, Thomas Smith at Emory University, supported the stimulus package but he now finds that although the funds may have resulted in some people being employed, the stimulus spending in the construction area has not resulted in creating jobs. Another economist compared the impact of federal stimulus funds to employment in the construction industry to trying to move the Empire State Building by pushing it.
The study specifically noted the experience of Marshall County, Tennessee, which has received a disproportionately high share of stimulus funding. Yet a Marshall County contractor quoted by the economists said that federal stimulus funds had not helped the working people of his county at all. The contractor’s business was almost completely dried up, despite the heavy infusion of federal stimulus funds.
In “Govt Spends Money Like Monopoly Money,” another online article for The New American of January 19, William P. Hoar noted that besides the $787 billion “stimulus” package, the Obama administration has continued its $700 billion bailout that it calls the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Hoar cited an Associated Press report that noted, the President “outlined major new government stimulus and jobs proposals on Tuesday, saying the nation must continue to ‘spend our way out of this recession.’ ”
Hoar observed:
The latest newfound monies to be spent by Obama, as noted in the AP piece, come largely from repayments made of the TARP bailout. That bailout was financed by debt. The President hopes to transfer much of that to his political allies. Critics on Capitol Hill uncharitably pointed out that these new proposed stimulus expenditures would be a violation of the law since the repayments were supposed to be used to reduce the deficit.
The Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote in his early 20th century work, The Life of Reason: “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Those who believe that we can spend our way out of recession need only study the history of the Great Depression of the 1930s, of which the current stimulus program’s advocates claim their plan has prevented a repetition.
It has long been the educated opinion of free-market economists, that instead of bringing the Great Depression to an early end — as a hands-off policy would have done — Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own “stimulus” program, called the New Deal, actually perpetuated it for years beyond its natural death.
Topic: Obama, Biden Claim Stimulus is Working (Read 574 times)