AMERICAN ISSUES PROJECT

It's clear to anyone with eyes to see that the stimulus package passed earlier this year was a miserable failure. Since Obama's push for health care reform over the past few months, little has been mentioned about the stimulus package. Everyone has been so preoccupied with health care that they've all but forgotten about the stimulus, and about whether or not it has worked. 

One of the main promises Obama made regarding the stimulus package was that it would save or create over one million jobs. While the claim was that the stimulus package would help stem the economic bleeding and help to save or create jobs, there was really nothing of the sort in the actual bill. The stimulus package was filled with Democrat pork projects, very few of which could conceivably help strengthen the economy. The president who promised he wouldn't sign a bill with a single earmark in it signed a bill that contained over <em>9,000</em> earmarks. Cities that received money from the package saw it mostly used for health care and education, rather than infrastructure. And the earmarks were ridiculous. There was $2 billion for child-care subsidies and $400 million for global warming research. There was $650 million for digital TV conversion coupons and $8 billion for renewable energy. The Smithsonian received $150 million and $7 billion to modernize federal buildings. Do any of these sound like job savers? After all, it's hard to understand how giving $36 billion to expand unemployment benefits, for example, could possibly help the economy, or how any of those other pork projects could help save or create jobs. And they haven't -- the unemployment rate has never grown so quickly since it started being tracked in 1948. 

Since the stimulus package's passing, we've lost an average of 16,000 jobs a day, and the unemployment rate has shot up to 9.8%, a 26-year-high. The budget deficit has quadrupled, and our public debt is currently around $11 trillion. And the stimulus package was one of the biggest causes for our current bleak financial situation. Yet Obama keeps trying to act as if it was a success.  Just last month, the White House was claiming that the stimulus package <a href=http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090910/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_stimulus_jobs>saved one million jobs</a>.

Reality, unfortunately, is not as sweet.

That prior claim was made even as the unemployment rate had risen as the year had gone on, and there had been an increase in the number of Americans unemployed of almost half a million. And the first stimulus reports are out, showing that for all of the White House spin, the truth is not quite as sunny as Obama would have you believe.

The $787 billion stimulus package <a href=http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/63299-first-hard-stimulus-data-finds-only-30000-jobs-saved-or-created->saved or created a whopping 30,083 jobs</a>. And of course, the White House has since changed it's tune. The 30,083 jobs has now <em>exceeded their expectations</em>... and it somehow still means that they've saved or created 1 million jobs. What the White House doesn't mention is that we've also <em>lost</em> almost 3.4 million jobs since the passage of the stimulus package in February. Even if the stimulus package did create or save 1 million jobs, it ultimately lost over twice that number. While the Democrats were worrying about butterfly gardens and planetariums and the NEA, Americans were struggling to make ends meet and hold onto their jobs.

It's also painful to think about the cost these 30,083 jobs came at. This initial report supposedly only covered $16 billion of the stimulus money. At that rate, each job cost just over $531,000 apiece. And I'd wager that none of those jobs paid enough to offset that cost either -- the national average salary is around $50,000. With a 15% federal income tax rate, it would take 70 years to pay off that $531,000 debt -- and that doesn't even take into account the interest. So can we really say that the stimulus package has been a success just because it saved a few jobs at an outrageous cost?

There are still, after all, 15.1 million unemployed Americans. With all of the hoopla surrounding health care, it's been easy to forget about them and the amount of debt we've amassed in the name of creating jobs for them. And while the number of jobs Obama claims to have saved each month keeps going up and down, his spin is really irrelevant. It's clearer than ever that the stimulus package has been a massive failure, and he still hasn't learned a thing.

Cassy Fiano is a sports journalist turned political blogger ( www.cassyfiano.com ). She's a twenty-something opinionated conservative who has worked on a presidential campaign, campaigned for George W. Bush in 2004, and served on the planning committee for the Jacksonville Tax Day Tea Party.

Posted 10-19-2009 12:01 AM

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