Bloodthirsty Liberal

Is it:

a) thousands and thousands

b) one-and-a-half million

c) two million?

Trick question! The correct answer is: d) all of the above!

White House advisers appearing on the Sunday talk shows gave three different estimates of how many jobs could be credited to President Obama’s Recovery Act.

The discrepancy was pointed out by a Republican official in an email to reporters noting that “Three presidential advisers on three different programs [gave] three different descriptions of the trillion-dollar stimulus bill.”

Valerie Jarrett had the most conservative count, saying “the Recovery Act saved thousands and thousands of jobs,” while David Axelrod gave the bill the most credit, saying it has “created more than – or saved more than 2 million jobs.” Press Secretary Robert Gibbs came in between them, saying the plan had “saved or created 1.5 million jobs.”

I’m with AxelRose on this one. Why, in the Guam 99th congressional district alone, they saved hundred of jobs—and it doesn’t even exist!

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist.

According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to “create or save” just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts–almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

The stimulus revived 8 recently retired congressional districts. Pennsylvania’s 21st District has received just under $2 million in funds. Mississippi’s 5th District and Oklahoma’s 6th received $1 million from the legislation, respectively. All three were eliminated by the 2000 census.

Many other recipients carried the banner for congressional districts that have been defunct for decades. South Carolina’s 7th took the cake, garnering more than $27 million in stimulus funds, despite being eliminated in 1930. And Virginia’s 12th District may have been written off at the start of the Civil War, but it must carry some sentimental value in Old Dominion–it received more than $2 million, according to recovery.gov.

Imagine how many jobs were saved in the 435 districts that do exist! Two million is conservative. At this rate, we’ll all have to work two jobs just to keep up with their numbers.

This story about bogus districts and phantom jobs is two months old, btw. We covered it, as did pretty much everyone else. Do they really think we forgot? Do they think we’re stupid? (Don’t answer that.) Do you believe anything that comes out of their mouths? (You don’t have to answer that.)

Your tax dollars—yours!—at work:

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008.

Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.

Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was issued to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, according to federal records.

Rush had this story, too, but he remembered in addition that Hillary’s concession in the primaries hinged on Obama paying off her campaign debts. How can we not draw our own conclusions, especially when, as Ed Morrissey puts it:

We’ve pulled capital out of the hands of people who actually create jobs, and handed it to people like Mark Penn, who saved three jobs at a taxpayer cost of $2 million per job.

And President Obama does so for the same reason a dog tongues his testicles: because he can.

I hate to admit it (are you buying that?), but the prospect of long-term unemployment gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside—like hot cocoa by a warm fire:

All last week I was frantic waiting for my invitation to the White House Jobs Summit to arrive. I thought about crashing, but recent events persuaded me that was neither prudent nor proper. Besides, my red kimono was at the dry cleaners.

Something tells me my views wouldn’t have been well received. I would have told President Barack Obama he faces significant obstacles in his effort to create jobs before the voters go to the polls in November 2010.

I’m not talking about the legality of “mobilizing” unused funds from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, as Obama put it in a speech yesterday at Washington’s Brookings Institution; or the inherent contradiction in “government job creation,” as if government can create jobs without commanding resources the private sector could have used to provide something the public wants.

The real question facing the nation, and one that Obama’s summits and speeches aren’t addressing, is this: What if the job losses this time around aren’t temporary, the “ebb” part of the ebb and flow of the business cycle? What if employers are hacking away at their permanent workforce?

There is support in the data for the idea that many of the lost jobs aren’t coming back. In November, a record 55.1 percent of job losses were categorized as permanent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average duration of unemployment reached a post-World War II high of 28.5 weeks. And 38.3 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, also a record.

Come on, aren’t you smiling? You may be cold and hungry, but the possibility that Congress and the White House may change hands sooner than any of us ever thought has to fill your bones and your belly with warm feelings, however insubstantial.

The president paid lip service to “fiscal responsibility,” reiterating his pledge to halve the deficit by the end of his first term. How his grand vision for health-care expansion, billed as reform, will achieve that is anybody’s guess.

The deficit isn’t as benign as some economists claim. Debt, the cumulative result of deficits, is closely allied with job growth.

In their book, “This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff document the protracted aftermath of financial crises in terms of their depth, duration and diffusion across the economy and industries.

“The true legacy of financial crises is more government debt,” Reinhart said in a presentation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Policy Forum on Dec. 4.

High government debt is associated with slower growth, she said. So “if we are concerned about growth, we should be concerned about debt.”

The same could be said about jobs. Economic growth is the best source of job growth. If growth is curtailed by soaring government debt, job creation will be sub-par as well.

The government can’t keep shoveling out money to “create jobs,” concoct some fictitious number of jobs that were created or saved and expect the public to buy it. Like the $787 billion stimulus, spending money to save money is not a winning strategy.

Okay, maybe I should have left off before this last part. I’m feeling a chill. Even if we “trow da bums out”, we may still be screwed.

According to Einstein, it was: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, Barack Insane Obama:

President Obama on Tuesday outlined a broad new proposal to try to spur jobs and give more help to Main Street consumers and businesses.

In a speech at the Brookings Institution, Obama said he wants to give small businesses tax breaks for new hires and equipment purchases. He also wants to expand American Recovery and Reinvestment Act programs and spend some $50 billion more on roads, bridges, aviation and water projects.

Finally, Obama would offer consumers rebates for retro-fitting their homes to consume less energy.

…

Obama did not give a price tag for his proposals but pointed out that there is more wiggle room in the federal budget since the 2008 financial system bailout program will cost $200 billion less than expected.

That the first stimulus has produced 10+% unemployment (when 8% was supposed to be the worst—and that was if we did nothing), that his next stated priority was deficit reduction (which re-paid TARP money was supposed to do), that every road in my area has already been dug up and repaved, that there’s still a ton of porkulus money in the pipeline, either budgeted and not yet spent, or not budgeted at all, that government can’t directly create jobs worth a damn—all that and so much more seems lost on this prize fool.

Yet after his “jobs summit”, this is the best he can do. I’m all for tax breaks—the more, the merrier—but why he didn’t resort to them in the first place, why he doesn’t resort to them more so now is a mystery.

No, really, it’s not. He would never cut taxes for the benefit of the economy if it meant one rich person got richer, even if a million poor people got less poor in the process. He can’t, he won’t, he never will.

You can still squeeze every job bogusly claimed to have been created or saved by the Stimulus into the Rose Bowl—but it’s filling up fast.

Don’t delay:

11/24/09 UPDATE:
California’s stimulus audit has found a massive overcount of more than 13,000 corrections jobs supposedly “saved.”

11/19 UPDATE:
We’ve added thousands more jobs in several dozen cities to our not really “created or saved” stimulus jobs map. The total number of jobs we have found to be “not really created or saved” now approaches 80,000. Several new states and the Territory of Guam have new entries. We will continue updating the map in the coming weeks.

Most of the new pins on our interactive map represent such un-started, un-funded contracts, according to data taken from Recovery.gov. Because the Obama administration has been using its inflated claim of 640,000 jobs “created or saved” to make projections for future stimulus job creation, these un-started, un-funded projects really should not be part of the total. Moreover, the administration itself has asked contractors not to make “projections” but to report jobs as they are “created or saved,” according to news reports.

More than ten percent of the jobs the Obama administration has claimed were “created or saved” by the $787 billion stimulus package are doubtful or imaginary, according to reports compiled from eleven major newspapers and the Associated Press.

Based only on our analysis of stimulus media coverage in the last two weeks, The Examiner has created this interactive map to document exaggerated stimulus claims. The map, which will be updated as new revelations appear, currently reflects an exaggeration by the Obama administration of about 75,000 jobs, out of the 640,000 jobs supposedly “created or saved.”

The map reflects reports from The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, the Sacramento Bee, The New York Times, USA Today, the Las Vegas Sun, the Detroit Free Press, the New York Post, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It remains a work in progress because relatively few newspapers have scrutinized stimulus spending so far.

The Obama administration has claimed that the $787 billion economic stimulus package “saved or created” some 650,000 jobs. But almost as soon as the White House trotted out this figure, news organizations found huge exaggerations in the reported data. Many of the jobs reportedly created do not exist or cannot be accounted for.

UPDATE: Today’s report from ABC News tells us that prior to releasing its jobs report, the administration cut out 60,000 additional jobs from unreliable reports, none of which appear to overlap with the ones we’ve highlighted here. Had those jobs been included in the original count, the number of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus would have exceeded 700,000, and the number of imaginary or doubtful jobs would have approached 20 percent.

It won’t be long before Obama supporters will take to remote forests, mountains, and islands to hold out hope for a recovery. Decades from now, they’ll still be there, one or two of them occasionally stumbling into civilization, blinking at the bright light.

Now, that’s doing land-office business:

[A]s we have seen here, phony “saved or created” numbers are the norm, not the exception, and most of the jobs data are insupportable.

And even Earl Devaney, the man in charge at Recovery.org, can’t deny it. In a response to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Devaney says that he cannot certify any of the jobs data published by the government:

…

“Your letter specifically asks if I am able to certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable. No, I am not able to make this certification,” Devaney wrote, in a letter provided to ABC News.

Devaney rejected Issa’s suggestion that the site include a more prominent disclaimer, such as an asterisk or a footnote. He said the site already does mention in a note to users that “errors and omissions” are likely.

They’re not bugs, they’re features.

With this complete fiasco of an economic stimulus, is it any wonder this headline appeared this morning?

Obama warns of a ‘double dip’ recession

He’s about the last to come to the realization.

And speaking of headlines we love:

Oct. home construction, permits fall unexpectedly

“Unexpected” by whom?

Construction of new homes unexpectedly plunged last month, as builders waited to see whether lawmakers would extend a tax credit for homebuyers.

The results show how much the housing market has been relying on government support for its fledgling recovery.

In other words, there is no recovery, nor any expectation of one, just government bailing.

Yesterday, I was sarcastically referred to as Pollyanna or Little Mary Sunshine for reporting similar news. I prefer Snidely of Sunnybrook Farm.

Can’t find a job? Go west, young man.

The North Dakota 99th is hiring—and paying good, too:

According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to “create or save” just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts–almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

Further:

The stimulus helped to create 35 congressional districts in Washington D.C. and the four American territories, all of which have no congressional districts. These areas received $5 of the $6.4 billion distributed to the non-existent districts.

I am on record as happily volunteering all of our congressional districts here in Massachusetts. I’d rather the likes of Barney Frank, John Tierney, William Delahunt, and Ed Markey go on the dole rather than pass legislation increasing it geometrically.

And when called on these absurd lies, the ObamaGeeks replied:

Ed Pound, Director of Communications for the board, said that the faulty information came from recipients of stimulus funds.

“People make errors, and we’ve found people are making errors in these reports,” Pound said…

Recipients file their reports on a password-protected site. That information is then relayed to officials who oversee the recovery.gov website to post, Pound said. Unless an egregious error is noted, Pound said they post the information exactly as it is received.

“Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.

I’d accept either one, especially from your boss.

Case after case of money being spent on bogus jobs, now in bogus places. No wonder unemployment jumped to 10.2% last month: good economic news travels slow from the North Dakota 99th and the Guam 2nd.

Sweet land of larceny,
Of thee I sing:

While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.

Picky, picky.

One of the largest reported jobs figures comes from Bridgewater State College, which is listed as using $77,181 in stimulus money for 160 full-time work-study jobs for students. But Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the college made a mistake and the actual number of new jobs was “almost nothing.’’ Bridgewater has submitted a correction, but it is not yet reflected in the report.

In other cases, federal money that recipients already receive annually - subsidies for affordable housing, for example - was reclassified this year as stimulus spending, and the existing jobs already supported by those programs were credited to stimulus spending. Some of these recipients said they did not even know the money they were getting was classified as stimulus funds until September, when federal officials told them they had to file reports.

“There were no jobs created. It was just shuffling around of the funds,’’ said Susan Kelly, director of property management for Boston Land Co., which reported retaining 26 jobs with $2.7 million in rental subsidies for its affordable housing developments in Waltham. “It’s hard to figure out if you did the paperwork right. We never asked for this.’’

The federal stimulus report for Massachusetts has so many errors, missing data, or estimates instead of actual job counts that it may be impossible to accurately tally how many people have been employed by the massive infusion of federal money. Massachusetts is expected to receive an estimated $1 billion more in stimulus contracts, grants, and loans.

Oh, come on, all you gotta do is go over to transparency.gov and it’s all there. That’s what President Obama said.

A billion dollars in Massachusetts essentially pissed away, unaccounted for, blown on maintaining a bloated and entrenched state bureaucracy. Are we the best, or what?

And, for once, we’re not alone:

We’ve already seen the deceptive and misleading statistics challenged by local and regional newspapers in several states, as well as by some of the national media. We can now add Colorado and Washington to that list, where Porkulus job numbers have been seriously inflated by adding in jobs that were never at risk in the first place.

…

The entire Porkulus accounting effort consists of these shell games. The Obama administration built it for this kind of dishonest reporting, in order to claim credit for doing something about joblessness while unemployment accelerates. We’ve wasted months and tens of billions of dollars already just to rescue states from doing what they should have done at the beginning of the year: downsize bureaucracies and roll back the cost of their government on their overburdened citizens.

These states join those already reporting the Porkulus fraud:

New Hampshire
Florida and Georgia
Ohio
Wisconsin
New Jersey
Virginia
Texas
Illinois

More will undoubtedly be forthcoming.

We’re right with you, Wisconsin! Wassup, Jersey! Illinois… well, maybe we’re not in that league of fraud. Yet.

While the stock market gave its unambiguous reaction to the phony growth reports in the economy, Jake Tapper cocked an eyebrow at some other bogus news from the White House:

The White House argues that the actual job number is actually larger than 640,000 — closer to 1 million jobs when one factors in stimulus jobs added in October and, more importantly, jobs created indirectly, such as “the waitress who’s still on the job,” Vice President Biden said today.

So let’s see. Assuming their number is right — 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?

Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, called that “calculator abuse.”

He said the cost per job was actually $92,000 — but acknowledged that estimate is for the whole stimulus package as of the end of 2010.

…

Of the 640,329 jobs cited today, White House officials said 80,000 were in the construction sector and more than half — 325,000 — were education jobs, despite President Obama’s claim in January that 90 percent of the stimulus jobs would be in the private sector.

Why bother? The numbers aren’t real. But the general idea is sound. The Obama administration has directed stimulus money to favored sectors of the economy—the teachers unions, most notably—as payoff for past support, and down payment on future support.

That “waitress who’s still on the job” must work at Katie’s Diner, which closed years before he talked about how much he still enjoyed hanging out there.

Is that anything like Erica Jong’s “zipless f**k” from Fear of Flying?

I have to admit I never got the z-less f (”got” as in “understood”); the jobless recovery is another oxymoron I don’t get:

Many of Massachusetts’ key industries have begun to rebound along with the broader economy, increasing sales and production, but hiring only cautiously - if at all.

That caution is contributing to what is almost certain to be another jobless recovery in Massachusetts and elsewhere, a pattern that has marked economic turnarounds since the early 1990s. Even though the economy is expanding, it is not growing fast enough to generate jobs and reduce unemployment in the state, already at its highest level since the 1970s.

Over the next year, economic activity in Massachusetts will increase more than 2 percent, slightly faster than in the nation as a whole, but employers here will still slice 37,000 more jobs, according to forecasts by Moody’s Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa. That job loss, while significant, is less than the projected rate nationwide.

That’s a great slogan. “Massachusetts: It Could Be Worse”

“We’re at the bottom, and it looks like we’re going to bounce along the bottom,’’ said Michael Goodman, eco nomic analyst and professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. “It’s going to be a long, hard slog.’’

…

Ultimately, Rosengren said, the state’s expansion will depend on whether the US economy can transition to a self-sustaining recovery from one fueled by stimulus programs. “The question is what happens when these programs go away,’’ Rosengren said. “To what extent is the private sector going to pick up activity as the government sector pulls back?’’

…

Such caution is among the reasons economists expect a jobless recovery lasting into next year. Another reason: Many companies cut employee hours to avoid layoffs, so as business picks up, they are likely to increase hours before hiring new workers.

At the same time, firms are boosting productivity, or getting more production from existing workers. In the second quarter of this year, productivity jumped 6.6 percent nationally, according to the Labor Department, more than triple the historical average.

“Overall, there’s a lack of confidence,’’ said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “Businesses are curtailing their layoffs, but they’re not hiring.’’

Let me see if I have this straight: stimulus money didn’t boost private investment, it merely replaced it. And it appears it had no carryover effect. And private firms are making do with what employees they still have.

That’s your economic brain trust at work. Timmy Geithner’s motto: why pay taxes when you can just raise them for everyone else?

I don’t know about “zipless”, but we’re sure f**ked.

PS: Rasmussen says only 1/3 of Americans polled think the stimulus helped the economy. As awful as that number is for the president’s number on domestic initiative, I do have to wonder if the decriminalization of medical marijuana is such a good idea. A good number of us already appear to be wasted.