On page A27 of today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman is at it again. Spending trillions of dollars we don’t actually have is what saved us from disaster, but we need to spend more! More! More! Krugman has written the same thing so many times, he apparently doesn’t need to bother with facts, just assertions. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Robert Barro and Charles Redlick did bother with facts, which happens to lead them to the exact opposite conclusion. But that isn’t the ugly part. The ugly part is that, …
The Denver Post reports: The goal was to build a reporting system that allows the public to follow the zigzagging paths of dollars awarded under the $787 billion federal stimulus package. A financial GPS of sorts. But despite federal lawmakers’ pledge of transparency, the final stages of most money trails, along with key information about job impacts, will remain invisible to users of the Recovery.org website when it debuts next month. Only details of a stimulus grant’s passage through its first two stops after it leaves the federal government must …
Even as National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers says the stimulus is working he also warned that he expects unemployment to remain unacceptably high for years to come. Unfortunately, Summers is half right: unemployment will probably stay high, but because of – not in spite of – the stimulus bill. The Obama administration claimed that the government spending in the nearly $800 billion stimulus bill would “create or save” millions of jobs. And in one limited sense it will. The enormous increases in government spending will directly employ many workers. …
In his speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday, Vice-President Joseph Biden claimed credit for saving between five hundred thousand to one million jobs. There is no way to measure the number of jobs saved by the stimulus bill. A better way to judge these figures is by the Administration’s own predictions of what the stimulus bill would to do to job growth and the unemployment rate. This chart shows the Administration’s projections for unemployment if Congress passed the stimulus, and the actual unemployment rate since then. The unemployment rate is …
When President Barack Obama sold his $787 billion stimulus package to the American people, he set one metric for success: jobs. Specifically, President Obama promised the American people he would create 4.1 million jobs by the end of 2010. According to the President’s plan, the stimulus should have lowered the nation’s unemployment rate below 8% by this August. That is the objective standard the President set for himself. And according to objective data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning, President Obama’s policies, and his stimulus package, have been …
The American people rightly believe that President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is a miserable failure. Vice President Joe Biden attempted to convince them other wise today announcing that the Obama administration met or exceeded all ten major projects that they claim defined the Recovery Act in its second 100 days. The New York Times reports: Biden took on critics who call the stimulus a “grab bag” of too many programs. “It doesn’t reflect a lack of design,” Mr. Biden said in a speech at the Brookings Institution. “That …
Yesterday we linked to analysis from Naval Postgraduate School Associate Professor David Henderson detailing how the Obama administration’s Cash for Clunkers program destroys, on average, $3,450 of our country’s wealth every time a car is destroyed through the program. Today, Capital University Law School professor Brad Smith brings us videos of seven perfectly good cars all being sacrificed in the name of Obama’s “stimulus.” Watch: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq99kSUR3Ss[/youtube]
If you thought Cash for Clunkers was terrible public policy, just wait till you hear the latest from Massachusetts: Federal economic stimulus cash was handed out to cons behind bars in Bay State prisons after a bureaucratic snafu resulted in $250 checks being sent to some inmates – and now red-faced feds want it back. “Taxpayers already believe the inmates are running the asylum in Washington,” U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said in a statement. “Now it appears they are being compensated for their efforts.”
On August 6, Christina Romer, the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, gave a talk entitled “So, Is It Working? An Assessment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act at the Five-Month Mark.” United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit judge Richard Posner has posted a response a The Atlantic, reading in part: Let me make clear at the outset that I support the stimulus, though I wish it had been better designed. … Romer argues in her talk that by the end of the second …
