IBD: Editorial: Lies, Damned Lies and Job Statistics

An example of how our tax dollars were spent on the stimulus package:

This was a piece of legislation bloated with waste and favors for public-sector interests. How many jobs were created or "saved," when the National Institute of Mental Health spent $823,200 of stimulus funds on training uncircumcised African men how to wash their private parts, as reported by CNSNews.com?

Will someone please explain why stimulus money was spent in Africa? Oh wait, is Obama giving money to African countries from the United States Treasury hoping someday after he is out of office to move there and be their leader? He sure knows how to fleece the American taxpayers with boondoggles.

The possibility of his economist having to defend the stimulus seems to be making his appointees flea the White House. Who can blame them as most people wouldn't want to defend what has turned out to a program filled with abuses and growing Government.

How many more lies are we going to be told by Obama and the people he has left before we get the real truth?

Editorial: Lies, Damned Lies and Job Statistics

Posted 07:10 PM ET, July 5, 2011

Economy: The White House tries to spin its own economists' conclusions that the Democrats' massive, ineffective stimulus package cost a whopping $278,000 per job. If only it was that cheap.

On the Friday of the July 4th weekend, obviously hoping that few would notice, President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers released a report on the effects of the $800 billion-plus American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Keynesian stimulus that the president claims saved America from a second Great Depression.

The CEA report concluded "that as of the first quarter of 2011, the ARRA has raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been by between 2.4 million and 3.6 million." The Weekly Standard did the math and pointed out that that amounts to "a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job." Early in the Obama administration, the CEA said that about $92,000 in government spending would create one job for one year.

But it's likely the real cost is far higher than the Standard reckoned. The Heritage Foundation once referred to it as the "Generational Theft Act," warning that its "temporary" provisions for increased funding for programs the left loves would never be reined in.

In 2009, it put the price tag at $3.27 trillion, pegging the cost per job at $900,000 to $1.3 million, depending on which figure on job creation or saving you accept.

(snip)

In 2009, Jared Bernstein, head of the White House Middle Class Working Families Task Force, was boasting "that the Recovery Act did indeed create or save about 1 million jobs in its first seven months." This year, Bernstein fled the White House for the high grass of a non-profit think tank rather than remain part of the team defending that amid a jobless rate above 9%.

Excerpt: Read More at IBD