High, persistent unemployment and a sluggish economy underscore what all but the most-dedicated supporters of Barack Obama know to be true: The president’s 2009 stimulus program was a massively expensive bust.

Understanding why the stimulus failed is an important step in understanding how the government can—and cannot—goose economic recovery. To get a better sense of how and where the stimulus went wrong, Reason.tv focused on Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that’s home to a large number of government contractors and other recipients of money earmarked for the sorts of “shovel ready” projects that were going to bring the economy back to life.

President Obama’s top economic advisor Larry Summers laid out ground rules for how stimulus dollars should be spent: The funds must be ”targeted” at resources idled by the recession, the interventions must be ”temporary,” and they needed to “timely,” or injected quickly into the economy.

None of that turned out to be true. “Even if you were to believe that government spending can trigger economic growth,” says Veronique de Rugy, Reason columnist and senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, “the money is never spent in a way that’s consistent with the conditions laid out by the Keynesians for it to be efficient.”

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Breitbart News editor Peter Schweizer writing in Newsweek:

When President-elect Obama came to Washington in late 2008, he was outspoken about the need for an economic stimulus to revive a struggling economy. He wanted billions of dollars spent on “shovel-ready projects” to build roads; billions more for developing alternative-energy projects; and additional billions for expanding broadband Internet access and creating a “smart grid” for energy consumption. After he was sworn in as president, he proclaimed that taxpayer money would assuredly not be doled out to political friends. “Decisions about how Recovery Act dollars are spent will be based on the merits,” he said, referring to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. “Let me repeat that: decisions about how recovery money will be spent will be based on the merits. They will not be made as a way of doing favors for lobbyists.”

You are probably familiar by now with this infamous graph published by the White House in January 2009 highlighting their expectations for the impact of the Recovery Act on the rate of unemployment. Far from leveling off at 8% and then declining, the actual unemployment rate ran up to 10% by the end of 2009 and has declined only slightly since to 9.5%, largely due to a decline in labor force participation. This in spite of the rapid passage of the massive $787 billion stimulus bill in February 2009. (Geoff at the Innocent Bystanders blog deserves everlasting credit for being the first to point out this disconnect.)

With the White House and other Democrats resolutely sticking to their claim that the stimulus bill “saved or created” 3-4 million jobs, I thought it might be worthwhile to point out that the very same January 2009 White House report also included an industry by industry forecast of where these 3-4 million jobs would come from. Here it is:

Thanks to the inclination of economists to model verifiable data (even when they are pulling numbers out of the sky), these industry categories happen to align perfectly with employment data tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thus we can easily compare the actual changes in employment to the figures forecast by the White House. In the table below, I’ve calculated the net change in employment by industry from February 2009, when the stimulus bill was passed, to July 2010, using the latest data available from the BLS. (Click row headings for data source.)

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Just prior to Barack Obama announcing self-imposed conditions on if and when America would use nuclear weapons, he made a North Carolina audience wilt under a 17-minute response to a fairly simple question.

According to a rather humorous blog by the Washington Post’s Anne E. Kornblut, Obama meandered for 17 minutes and 2,500 words in response to a woman wondering if  it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” reform.  “We are over-taxed as it is,” she stated.

His best answer, from his perspective, would have simply been to have said, “Yes.”  But he knows that’s not a popular answer.  Instead, he kept  talking,  on and on, to the point where listeners no longer cared about what he was saying or why. They just want him to shut up.

His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”).

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Admittedly, Media Matters doesn’t have a deep well of credibility, but even I was shocked by the sloppiness of this hack-attack yesterday. Their headline:

Nate Silver takes the Hot Air out of Cato’s stimulus attack

And opening line:

Right-wing blogger Allahpundit put some Hot Air behind a piece of Cato Institute research that sought to attack stimulus spending as unfairly tilted in favor of Democratic congressional districts.

Except, you know, it wasn’t a Cato study. It was a Mercatus Center study. If Media Matters had even bothered to look at the actual study, pausing just a few moments from launching their attack, they would have seen that. Here is the study, technically a ‘working paper,’ but the title page is very clear, Mercatus Center: George Mason University.

Media Matters also identifies the study’s author, Big Government Contributor Veronique de Rugy, as a “Cato Scholar.” But, their own link for de Rugy makes it clear that she is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and used to work at Cato. AKA, in the past.  Does Media Matters even follow their own links?

Sure, these may seem like minor points, but getting obvious facts so completely wrong is indicative of the drive-by, hit-and-run style of analysis employed by Media Matters.

There is, actually, a much more substantial error on their part.

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An unlikely power figure has emerged in the Obama Administration. He’s not a great orator, nor trendy, nor well-known.  But, if the ability to influence national leaders, shape a national agenda and influence public opinion are indicators, then, Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is, arguably, the most powerful and,  potentially, most dangerous, man in Washington, DC.

As Director of OMB, Peter Orszag is the arbiter of all financial information shared with Congress.  A series of little-known, OMB “circulars”, such as A-11, have established the rules, and repercussions if violated, by which Executive branch agencies communicate with Congress, especially regarding budgets, funding and agency priorities.

OMB, the President’s gatekeeper for budget matters, executes a complicated juggling act, balancing Obama Administration priorities and budgetary spin, against agency needs.   Frequently, to secure a critical vote, an elected member may be rewarded with a pork project for the folks back home, and, often, it’s the OMB director that has to figure out how to avoid the appearance of a bald-faced bribe, while manipulating CBO scoring on infrastructure projects.  Orszag, as the former head of CBO, understands exactly how this game is played.  Thus, most of the project and budget information that Congress reviews have been shaped by OMB’s preferences.

Peter Orszag controls much of the content and quantity of the data flow to Congress, to the President and to American citizens.  Orszag has oversight over most of the federal government’s critical data reporting structures.  Apart from the ineffective and error-prone Stimulus reporting sites (data.gov, recovery.gov),, OMB oversees federal contract opportunities and federal grants.

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If you ask people on the street (outside of Chicago) if they have ever heard of ShoreBank, the answer would likely be “no.” While ShoreBank isn’t a Goldman Sachs, a Bank of America, or a JP Morgan, to the Progressives, this “little” bank is in many ways every bit as big and important as the aforementioned “large banks.”

Why?

One of the core components of President Obama’s fundamental change for America is to create clean energy jobs, also known as “green jobs”.  During his campaign and as recently as his State of the Union Address, President Obama continues to talk about the need “green” jobs. In fact, during his State of the Union 2010 speech, the President stated, “We should put more Americans to work building clean energy facilities –  and give rebates to Americans who make their homes more energy-efficient, which supports clean energy jobs. “

In a speech given by the President in Virginia on Dec. 15, 2009, he said, “The simple act of retrofitting these buildings to make them more energy-efficient — installing new windows and doors, insulation, roofing, sealing leaks, modernizing heating and cooling equipment — is one of the fastest, easiest and cheapest things we can do to put Americans back to work while saving families money and reducing harmful emissions.”

In the  stimulus package last year, President Obama devoted nearly $60 billion of his plan for building a new green-based economy.

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In Washington, a crisis isn’t real until it has its own budget line-item. The $3-odd trillion we’ll spend this year is, apparently, a ‘best-case’ scenario. Anything unusual happen; a hurricane, earthquake, wild-fires, or, say, a possible flu epidemic, and we’re going to need extra or ’supplemental’ appropriations. Our federal budget, it seems, is so lean and tight, there simply isn’t any extra money lying around to cover the unexpected ‘crisis.’

This scenario played out yesterday when Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testified before Congress on the still-anticipated H1N1 ‘pandemic’:

The government’s disease prevention chief said Tuesday that a new vaccine to prevent the spread of the H1N1 virus is expected to be widely successful but warned that cuts to state and local public health programs could hamper a nationwide effort to administer the shots.

Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee that “decades of underinvestment in public health and public health infrastructure” and the recent furloughing and firing of public health workers as a result of the economic downtown could make it “even more challenging to implement the vaccination program.”

Well, yes, vaccines do cost money. If only we had some money for health and disease prevention. Oh wait:

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