COMMENTARY | Critics of President Barack Obama's nearly $900 billion stimulus package consider it a failure, the equivalent of burning the money in a bonfire for all the effect it has had on the American economy. Now the president's Council of Economic Advisers agrees.
It has been claimed that the stimulus "created or saved" 2.4 million jobs. According to the Weekly Standard, the report suggests that every job "saved or created" by the stimulus cost $278,000. That means the government could have come out ahead if it just cut checks for $100,000 and distributed them to the unemployed.
The report also suggests that the economy would have "created or saved" jobs even without the stimulus. Furthermore, the stimulus is now having the reverse effect over the past six months, shedding jobs as the stimulus money runs out.
Here are some sobering statistics that demonstrate the ultimate effects of the stimulus:
* Unemployment rate before the stimulus: 7.3 percent
* Unemployment rate after the stimulus: 9.1 percent (It was supposed to keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent.)
* National debt before the stimulus: $9.986 trillion
* National debt after the stimulus: $14.467 trillion (and rising)
In theory, if the stimulus money had actually been spent on infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, and technology development, there might have been a lasting economic effect. Unfortunately the stimulus money was spent on every pork barrel project imaginable, as well as giveaways to the labor unions. A lot of the money went to states with profligate spending practices to pay the salaries of bureaucrats who also happened to be members of public sector unions (political supporters of the president and his party in Congress).
In effect, the stimulus package was the greatest robbery in the history of civilization, fleecing the American taxpayers and using the money to pay off congressional Democrats and their supporters. It suggests that the Obama administration not only had no notion of how to stimulate the economy but actually had no care to do so. The stimulus should be seen as graft and corruption on an epic scale, done in the guise of economic stimulus.
How is that hope and change thing working out for you?
Source:Obama's Economists: 'Stimulus' Has Cost $278,000 per Job, Jeffrey H. Anderson, The Weekly Standard, July 5. 2011
