By Andrew Cline on 2.18.10 @ 6:08AM
At best it funded jobs -- government jobs -- which government can
no longer afford.
Only 6 percent of Americans believe the stimulus bill passed a
year ago this week has created jobs, a CBS News/New York
Times poll reported last week. Six percent. Nearly six times
as many Americans believe in ghosts as believe President Obama's
jobs claims. It isn't hard to see why. All you have to do is go
to the government's own website, www.recovery.gov,
and look at the numbers. The site reports 1.2 million jobs funded
by the stimulus bill by the end of 2009. Note the terminology.
That's jobs funded, not created. The administration switched from
jobs "created or saved" to jobs "funded" for accuracy's sake. Or
maybe to stop the mockery. Either way, it's a telling
methodology.
President Obama would have us believe that the stimulus is
working because the government spent a bunch of money, and that
money funded 1.2 million jobs. And he has the nerve to complain
that dividing the number of jobs funded into the amount spent to
come up with a price per job is simplistic.
If creating jobs were that easy, the government could
simply tax the country into endless prosperity. But the money has
to come from somewhere. For the stimulus bill, it was borrowed.
That borrowing, combined with the rest of the massive government
debt-taking in the past year, has left less money available for
investors. Which means fewer jobs funded by the private sector
than otherwise would have been.
The question is not: How many jobs were funded by the
stimulus bill? The question is: How many jobs would have been
funded if that same money had been put to other uses? The
American people seem to think, not unreasonably, that more jobs
would have been created without the stimulus bill than with
it.
They also seem to understand that there is a big difference
between a permanent private-sector job and a temporary stimulus
job. Recovery.gov reports that of the 634,000 stimulus jobs
funded from Feb. 17 to Oct. 1, 2009, 601,000 were funded by
grants. The largest grant recipient was the Governor's Office of
Planning and Research in Sacramento, Calif. The second-largest
was the Executive Office of the State of Washington. The third
largest was "New York, State of." Go down the list. They're
almost all state offices.
The bulk of the stimulus money was given to governors to
spend on shoring up their state budgets. That money went
primarily to employ government workers. A small fraction went to
vendors.
The fraction of stimulus funds that were contracts, not
grants, and went to "shovel-ready" projects went, of course, to
short-term construction projects. When those projects are done,
those jobs will cease to exist. The same can be said for many of
the government jobs funded this past year. Many school districts,
for instance, have already burned through their stimulus money. A
lot of teachers will get pink slips this spring.
Much of the stimulus amounted to a "cash for clunkers" for
jobs. "Cash for clunkers" basically moved car purchases from the
future to last summer, meaning it delayed many auto industry
layoffs. The stimulus bill moved the date of a lot of other
layoffs. Instead of coming last year, they'll come this
year.
So even though the Obama administration can point to
specific jobs and say they were funded by the stimulus spending,
it cannot say the jobs are permanent, or that the stimulus was
the most effective way to create the largest number of
jobs.
If the American people don't believe the stimulus bill
created jobs, it's not just because of the inflated numbers in
early reports of jobs "created or saved" last year. It's because
the very idea of politicians creating lasting economic strength
by borrowing $787 billion and doling it out to other politicians
is simply preposterous. Even more preposterous than
ghosts.
topics:
Unemployment, Job Creation
