Despite Vice-President Biden’s claim, the reality shows that, despite costing more than the administration expected, the stimulus still hasn’t created the jobs they promised.

CLAIM:  Democrats assert stimulus failed because Republicans kept it small.

Democrats repeatedly promised their massive 2009 stimulus plan would create over 3 million new jobs.  It hasn’t.  Instead, unemployment climbed to 10 percent as over 2 million more jobs were eliminated.  This weekend Vice President Biden took the extraordinary step of suggesting stimulus failed because Republicans made it “too small”:

TAPPER: Was the stimulus, in retrospect, too small?

BIDEN: Look, there’s a lot of people at the time argued it was too small. Actually, we…

TAPPER: A lot of people in your administration.

BIDEN: — yes. A lot of people in our administration, a lot of — I mean, you know, even some Republican economists and some Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman, who continues to argue it was too small. But, you know, there was a reality. In order to get what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes. And we found three — three. And we finally got it passed. So there is the reality of whether or not the Republicans are willing to play, whether or not the Republicans are just about repeal and repeat the old policies or they’re really wanting to do something. And I — I’m not — I’m not — you know…

TAPPER: So if you didn’t have Republicans that you had — if you didn’t have the legislative reality…

BIDEN: I think what…

TAPPER: — it would have been bigger?

BIDEN: I think it would have been bigger. I think it would have been bigger. In fact, what we offered was slightly bigger than that…

FACTS:  Democrats’ stimulus bill failed on its own merits, not because – at $862 billion or nearly $3,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. – it was “too small.”

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The Associated Press has a story this morning called “Unemployment challenges Obama’s economic narrative.” No kidding.

I never get tired reminding stimulus advocates that before the stimulus bill was passed, the president scared the bejesus out of many people by claiming that if the Stimulus bill wasn’t passed, unemployment would reach 8.8 percent. Also, his team promoted the idea that the stimulus would create 3.3 million jobs (not just saved). They even had numbers and a model to prove it.

So the president got his cash, $789 billion which grew to $862 billion, and unemployment kept going up. It even passed 10 percent at one point and is now stagnating at 9.7 percent–where it’s scheduled to stay for a while.

And it’s not the only “job bill” that was passed. There was one in March 2020 ($18 billion) and another one in April 2010.

By the president’s own logic, the stimulus failed. That’s why he  has shifted his argument. Sure, the economy lost jobs, he now says, but without the stimulus it would have lost nearly 2 million more jobs. How you go about proving that this is not true is impossible and this is why it’s not powerful. It doesn’t make it right.

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The number of jobs in the U.S. is currently 129.7 million.  So to justify the Administration’s current claim of 2.8 million jobs “created or saved” by stimulus, they need to also claim that without that stimulus there would be only 126.9 million jobs.  That’s exactly what they do, displayed as the “baseline projection” level in the graphic below from an April 14, 2010 report:

An inconvenient truth, at least for the Obama Administration, is that once upon a time, in their January 2009 Romer/Bernstein Report they told America that without their stimulus there would be 133.9 million jobs.  That’s right, in order to make it look like their stimulus has “created or saved” 2.8 million jobs, the Obama Administration first had to whack 7 million jobs from their previous estimates.

Here’s the math:

Step 1: How many jobs does the Administration currently claim there would be, without stimulus?

129.7 million Current number of U.S. jobs

-  2.8 million Jobs currently claimed to be “created or saved”

126.9 million Jobs the Administration currently claims there would be without stimulus

Step 2: How does that compare with the number of jobs the Administration used to say there would be without stimulus?

133.9 million January 2009 projection of jobs without stimulus

- 126.9 million Current claim of jobs without stimulus

= 7 million Jobs removed from the Administration “baseline” to justify their latest stimulus job creation claims

Here’s the story problem:

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Because it wasn’t painful enough to know that the “stimulus” money is heavily used to pay for the union-inflated salaries of thousands of bureaucrats in the states, or paying for jobs in phantom districts, or even better, going to recipients who happily spent it without creating any jobs, now we can see how much of the “stimulus” money is going to pay for picnic tables or to replace the motor of a government-owned boat.

For instance, I can see now that R. J. THOMAS MANUFACTURING COMPANY, INC received 4 different awards totaling roughly a $110,000 in exchange for picnic tables (because we know how stimulating these are)

Check out this website called Stimulus Watch. It allows you to search for contracts and grant awards by state and city, by awarding agency, or by recipient. And they will even have a keyword search soon. The really cool aspect of the site is that once you find an award that interests you, you can vote on whether you are satisfied with it or not, add to the wiki description of the project, and join in the conversation about the award in the comments section.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Law was rushed through Congress in the wake of an enormous corporate accounting scandal that shook Wall Street and investors across the country. CEO’s and officers at several large companies were found to have “cooked the books”; i.e. knowingly falsified earnings statements to maintain stock prices or propel them higher. The practice came to be known as, Enron-Style Accounting.

The new law had many provisions, but one of its more sweeping was the requirement that corporate officers and executives assume personal responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of financial reports. In some cases, corporate officers could face civil or even criminal penalties if the numbers they reported to the public turned out to be inaccurate.

If only the law applied to politicians.

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Earlier this year the federal government sent $3 billion tax dollars to the state of Illinois to provide financial support for education as part of the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, a.k.a. “the stimulus,”.  Not for building schools, mind you.  There is money for that elsewhere in the $787 billion spend-a-thon.  This is for good old-fashioned reading, writing and arithmetic.  Of course, there are many reasons this is antithetical to the temporary economic jump-start concept behind the stimulus, but that is not the point here.

The State of Illinois dutifully began doling out this newfound largess to boost funding for low income schools under the Title 1 program, and to fund special education under the IDEA Part A program.  One can see the rationalization to increase funding for schools in poor areas in a recession, but it’s a bit of a stretch to see how the economic downturn has increased demand for special education.  But, again, that is not the subject of this piece.

As the Obama Administration has ramped up its efforts to portray the stimulus as an unqualified success that has rescued us from certain doom, they have resorted to the kinds of shoddy claims that smack of political desperation.

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