The Recovery Act Is Working Exactly As Intended

It’s been a year since his election and it’s well past the time for Barack Obama to stop blaming the economy on his predecessor. Barack Obama owns this economy. He bought it with $787 billion dollars borrowed from our children’s future. And according to the Chosen One himself, his stimulus package is “working exactly as intended.”

Considering how well that first stimulus worked, we should all feel apprehensive when we hear that Obama is considering a second stimulus. According to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, a second economic stimulus package is, “being hotly discussed and very seriously considered within the administration as well as members of Congress.”

Oh goody!

Well, 2010 is an election year, votes are for sale and the first stimulus has run its course. Christina Romer, the architect of the first stimulus, testified that her initial effort “will likely be contributing little to further growth. ... [R]obust job gains may still be several quarters away.”

What too many people fail to recall, and in many cases I consider this willful amnesia, is that Obama’s sales pitch for the first stimulus package included a promise that, if passed, unemployment would rise no higher than 8%. Without the stimulus package, Obama’s economic team (which includes Christina Romer), predicted that unemployment might rise as high as 9%.

For reference, the official unemployment rate is now 9.8% and is predicted to soar past 10%. And that’s an underestimate. When one considers the underemployed and those who have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is actually about 16% or 17%.

The “recovery act is working exactly as intended.”

Obama promised that he would create or save 3.5 million jobs. But recently the Obama Administration boasted that it had “created or saved” a somewhat more modest 650,000 jobs, a number repeated uncritically over and over last weekend by the Obama approved real news organization, CNN. Not even Katie Couric could gag that one down. She reported that many of the jobs “created or saved” were neither. Jobs were reported as created or saved that existed previously and were never in jeopardy. In some cases stimulus money was used to give raises.

The “recovery act is working exactly as intended.”

The Obama Administration boasted that it had created or saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council. The Associated Press found that only 508 people actually work there.

Obama claimed to have “saved or created” over 9,000 jobs in one federal office - the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services. What really happened is that about 2/3 of 14,506 employees at that agency received raises and their jobs were never in jeopardy. The 85 jobs that Obama claimed to have saved at the Bergen County Community Action Program in Hackensack, New Jersey were also never threatened, and the federal stimulus money it received was used to give themselves raises.

The “recovery act is working exactly as intended.”

Even if one accepts the job numbers “saved or created” by the imaginative
employment accounting processes employed by the Obama Administration, when one runs the numbers that still calculates out to about $200,000 -$250,000 spent per job supposedly created or saved. That’s not stimulus. That’s gross waste.

But take comfort because the “recovery act is working exactly as intended.”

And it has not come free, even though Obama has been printing money to cover the bills. Profligate money printing is inflationary. Those radio advertisements about investing in gold make sense. During the Bush years, the price of oil rose because a booming economy increased demand. Today the price of oil is rising because the value of the dollar is plummeting. There are trillions more of them around and the economy has little velocity. The value of dollars, like any other commodity, is driven by supply and demand. Obama has greatly increased the supply and demand for dollars is falling, as evidenced by the long, unbroken string of “disappointing” treasury auctions.

By the metrics that Obama himself provided us in his predictions, his economic stimulus package is a miserable failure. If it has worked “exactly as intended,” then we need to revisit the motivations of this crowd. We can already give them an “F” for their incompetence.

If there were any justice in this world, Obama’s words, “working exactly as intended,” would be the equivalent of Bush’s “mission accomplished.”