House Republicans are stepping up to the plate and asking Americans on Main Street what we need to do to get the economy back on track.  On Monday, Members of the Economic Recovery Working Group unveiled a 13-miniute video which takes a look at the debt crisis facing our country, titled “Obama’s Endgame: A Look at the National Debt.”

There’s a real disconnect in Washington these days.  I fear, as so many Americans do, that too many representatives in Congress are secluded in Washington, making laws that will fundamentally shift how our economy operates without considering the real-world consequences.  Americans are rightly frustrated watching the national debt skyrocket while ordinary Americans are trying to keep their heads above water.

Over 1.3 million Americans have used YouCut, a project aimed at introducing commonsense savings measures, as a platform to tell Washington to stop the out-of-control spending.  Folks across America are tightening their budgets and finding ways to save in this tough economy.  And they’re rightly disgusted by the gross abuse of taxpayer money on pet projects and inefficient federal programs.  The President and the Democratic leadership are running out of ways to explain why the government can’t keep its fiscal house in order and they’re hard-pressed to find anyone who believes that growing the national debt by $4.9 billion a day is healthy.

The video raises serious concerns over how Washington’s spending spree will hurt the economy.  It’s an in-depth analysis, complete with charts and graphs, showing how specific policies will only continue to perpetuate a culture of irresponsible spending.  One of my favorite segments of the video is when my colleague Mr. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin explains—in simple terms—what happens when the foreign governments who hold our debt start to question whether we’re getting our fiscal house in order; inflation will rise and the middle class will be on the hook.  These are real, serious concerns that our kids will have to face if we don’t curb out spending habits.

(more…)

From the UK’s Daily Telegraph:

Can it get any worse for President Obama? Undoubtedly yes. Here are 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in serious trouble, and why its prospects are unlikely to improve between now and the November mid-terms.

1. The Obama presidency is out of touch with the American people

In a previous post I noted how the Obama presidency increasingly resembles a modern-day Ancien Régime, extravagant, decaying and out of touch with ordinary Americans. The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Spain at a time of widespread economic hardship was symbolic of a White House that barely gives a second thought to public opinion on many issues, and frequently projects a distinctly elitist image. The “let them eat cake” approach didn’t play well over two centuries ago, and it won’t succeed today.

2. Most Americans don’t have confidence in the president’s leadership

This deficit of trust in Obama’s leadership is central to his decline. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, “nearly six in ten voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country”, and two thirds “say they are disillusioned with or angry about the way the federal government is working.” The poll showed that a staggering 58 per cent of Americans say they do not have confidence in the president’s decision-making, with just 42 per cent saying they do. (more…)

CNN, together with Moody’s Investor Services, published a map of the U.S. showing per capita state debt.

This debt map brought to mind another map, this one the Electoral College map from the 2008 election.  President Obama won 28 states and the District of Columbia totaling 365 Electoral College votes, to McCain’s 22 states totaling 173 Electoral College votes.

Now, compare the high-debt states to the states shown in blue that voted for Obama—the linkage between debt and voting behavior is visually clear.

According to Moody’s, the average state per capita debt of the 28 Obama states is $1,728 while the average debt in the 22 McCain states is less than half, at $749.  This information alone says a lot about voters and their attitude towards government and debt.  Voters with a propensity to elect politicians who burden future generations who can’t yet vote with huge debts voted for Obama while fiscally responsible voters generally voted for McCain.

This trend gets starker when you look at the debt in the states that voted overwhelmingly for one candidate.  The six states where Obama received the highest percentage of the vote were: Hawaii, Vermont, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maryland.  McCain received his highest percentage of votes in Oklahoma, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Alabama and Alaska.  The strongest Obama states had a per capita debt high of $4,606 for Massachusetts and a low of $709 for Vermont—remember, the average per capita debt in the McCain states was only $749, barely above the debt level in Vermont, with its “less is more” ethic.  Per capita debt in the strong McCain states ranged from a high of $1,345 in oil-rich Alaska to a low of $77 in coal-rich Wyoming.  The average per capita debt state debt in the strong Obama states: $2,697, almost $1,000 greater than the average debt in the 28 states he won.  McCain’s six strongest states tell the opposite tale with a per capita state debt of $713, a little more than a quarter of the debt load racked up in the states that most enthusiastically went for Obama.

(more…)

In the fight to retain his Congressional House seat, North Carolina U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge (NC-2) emailed and mailed letters and newsletters from his House account last week. Observant voters noted that Etheridge used taxpayers dollars to underwrite the mailings, sending the pieces just ahead of the franking 90-day deadline before the election. Etheridge is the politician who pushed a student journalist when he was queried by the young man on a D.C. street.

Challenger Renee Ellmers, clinical director of a wound care center in Dunn, NC, is calling him on it. In an August 10th letter sent to Etheridge, Ellmers wrote:

“In every way these mailings resembled typical campaign ads, except they were paid for by taxpayers and not by your campaign.

In the text of one pamphlet you mailed you told voters you are “reducing the deficit and restoring budget discipline” in Washington. How much did this mailing (and your emailings) cost taxpayers? How many people received the mailings and emails? How can you explain writing taxpayers that you are “reducing the deficit” when you are wasting thousands of dollars of their money on political mailings to help you get reelected?”

Rep. Etheridge has more than a million dollars in his campaign account.

According to a poll of Second District voters done in June by Survey USA , 55% to 38% voting in Etheridge’s district disapprove of the job Barack Obama is doing as president. Yet Etheridge voted with Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama 97% of the time, voting for every major item of the Obama agenda, including ObamaCare.

A majority of voters – 53% — in his district disapprove of the Healthcare reform legislation. Etheridge also voted for the Wall Street bailout, despite voter disapproval of 61%.

Etheridge supported Obama’s so called “stimulus” bill and trillion dollar deficit. The result: North Carolina’s employment figures are some of the bleakest in the country. Last February North Carolina’s unemployment hit a record high 11.2%, ranking 10th among States in unemployment.

(more…)

From the Associated Press:

The employment picture is looking bleaker as applications for jobless benefits rose last week to the highest level in almost six months.

It’s a sign that hiring is weak and employers are still cutting their staffs.

First-time claims for jobless benefits edged up by 2,000 to a seasonally adjusted 484,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. Analysts had expected a drop. That’s the highest total since February.

Initial claims have now risen in three of the last four weeks and are close to their high point for the year of 490,000, reached in late January. The four-week average, which smooths volatility, soared by 14,250 to 473,500, also the highest since late February.

(more…)

Earlier this season, Team Obama launched a PR offensive designed to convince Americans that a real economic recovery was underway. They called it ”Recovery Summer!” Note the exclamation point. They wanted you to really, really get that they believed we were in “recovery.” It wasn’t just a ”recovery.” It was “Recovery Summer!”

We should have known it was all illusory quackery when they wheeled out Joe Biden to talk it up.

Today we learn that the “recovering” economy shed 131,000 jobs last month, the second straight month of falling employment. More and more temporary census jobs ended, and the private sector added a paltry 71,000 jobs, far fewer than most expected. In more bad news, the government revised payrolls for May and June to show 97,000 FEWER jobs than originally reported.

All of the arrows are down.

For the $1 trillion-plus that the Democrats have spent trying to “create jobs” and “stimulate the economy,” this is where we are: job losses, not job creation; a formal 9.5% unemployment rate with the real unemployment rate at 18%; stagnant growth; and an exploding deficit and national debt.

Heckuva job, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.

(more…)

With the disappointingly soft jobs report for July, and a faltering recovery overall, is Team Obama getting ready for some sort of new, liberal-left, Keynesian, big-bang stimulus package? Will they be desperate to “do something”?

Already there are rumors of an August surprise (to use the phrase of business columnist Jimmy Pethokoukis) where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac forgive underwater mortgages held by millions of Americans. And with state and local government jobs having fallen 169,000 year-to-date, perhaps the Democratic Congress and the White House will seek an even bigger spending plan for teachers and Medicaid workers — on top of the $26 billion plan that just passed the Senate.

Or maybe the Democrats will come up with a new infrastructure-spending bill, perhaps for green technologies and whatnot. Or maybe they’ll extend unemployment benefits even more. My liberal friend Robert Reich is even talking up the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), where the government employed millions during the 1930s.

With the announcement this week that Council of Economic Advisers chair Christy Romer will leave the White House to go back to teach at Berkeley, it looks like the center of economic gravity will shift leftward inside the West Wing.

Meanwhile, over at the Fed, it seems ever more likely that the FOMC meeting next week will produce a much more dovish policy statement, one that will lengthen the “extended period” near-zero-interest-rate language and hint at new cash purchases of Treasury and mortgage bonds to increase the central bank’s balance sheet and expand the basic money supply. Already, in recent weeks, the dollar has been plunging.

Of course, Republicans will push harder to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy — as they should. But Democrats are now trapped by Treasury man Tim Geithner’s statements that extending low tax rates for successful earners, investors, and small businesses would actually imperil economic recovery. This is his war against investment and capital formation.

(more…)

Those of us who had to square dance in grade school may remember the old Virginia Reel; the caller commanding us to do the dos-a-do which was a spin move in one direction and then another.  That spin, however, doesn’t compare with the Obama Administration’s version of that dance move, in which the American people are told one thing, and then with dizzying speed, find out something else . . . the truth. Fortunately, most Americans are beginning to focus on the complete disconnect between the absurdity of the claims made by the Administration’s spinmeisters and the people’s own sense of reality.

The most breathtaking flight of fancy from Washington this past week was the full- court press by the President, Vice President, Chairperson of the White House Council of Economic Advisors and a whole host of Obama acolytes to proclaim that the Stimulus is working, that we’re “ahead of schedule” on job creation and that we’ve created  (or saved) millions of jobs.  The job saving claim is, in a strange way, irrefutable…sort of like a witch doctor saying if he hadn’t done his rain dance, the drought would have been worse.  As Democratic Senator Max Baucus complained to the White House “you created a situation where you cannot be wrong.  If 2,500,000 jobs are lost, you claim that without your stimulus program, 3,500,000 jobs would have been lost.  Taken to its logical conclusion, if everyone except one person were laid off, the Administration could claim that without its stimulus program, that person would have lost his job.”

There is, of course, a reason for this disciplined chorus of downright silly spin.  The Administration knew that data were about to be released from a variety of reliable sources revealing a further decline in manufacturing and retail activity, a further pull back in private sector hiring plans and industry investment plans, unemployment stubbornly stuck at just under ten percent and a further sinking of consumer confidence.  What’s a “fella” to do with elections coming and millions of jobs lost?  Dance the old dos-a-do and around you go, and claim the stimulus saved jobs.

This further sinking of consumer confidence is particularly significant and vexing to the Administration.  Consumer confidence is a consequence of the consumers’ sensitivity to what they see, hear and feel all around them.  It is reality. It can’t be manufactured, successfully manipulated (for very long), divined from the White House or spoon fed from a teleprompter.

(more…)

July 20, 2010, Wall Street Journal “White House on Perpetual Tour to Boost Stimulus”

“President Barack Obama and top officials are stepping up the pace of their travel to promote the economic stimulus package to skeptical voters—particularly in states with close mid-term election contests in the fall. The White House has announced a total of 172 trips outside Washington, D.C., in which administration officials have discussed the stimulus package and its economic impact in the year and a half since the package was signed.”

July 20, 2010, The White House. Office of the Press Secretary “President Obama Expands Greenhouse Gas Reduction Target for Federal Operations”

Washington, DC – President Obama announced today that the Federal Government will reduce greenhouse gas pollution from indirect sources, such as employee travel and commuting, by 13% by 2020….

(more…)

How much more stimulus money is spent in swing districts? A lot. Using the data from Recovery.gov and data about swing districts, we see on the chart below that swing districts on average have reported spending $13.5 million more of stimulus funds than non-swing districts. The numbers are the following:

Stimulus funds to the average swing district: $437,371,451.46

Stimulus funds to the average non-swing district: $423,870,363.65

Swing district premium: $13,501,087.81

The list of swing districts comes from the Real Clear Politics  map of congressional districts.  They have a breakdown of  districts using a dark blue to dark red scale and toss-up districts are in gray.  They also do a very credible breakdown based on polling to show which districts belong where.  Check it out here. The Recovery data comes from recovery.gov and is available for download here.

(more…)

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.”

(more…)

In his recent trip to Racine, Wisconsin, President Obama claimed that his stimulus policies worked and “saved jobs.” He also said that his policies staved off another Great Depression. But lets take a look at some of the graft, waste and pointless, useless, wild-eyed spending that was in his so-called stimulus.

• $5 million to create a geothermal energy system for a shopping mall in Tennessee. The mall is over half empty of tenants and has had falling shopper attendance for years *
• $1.57 million to Penn State University study fossils in Argentina *
• $100,000 to a puppet theater in Minnesota *
• $2 million to build a replica railroad tourist trap in Carson City, Nev. *
• A boat cruise company in Chicago got almost $1 million to “combat terrorism” *
• $500,000 went to Ariz. State Univ. to study ant genetics *
• Another $450,000 went to Uinv. of Arizona to study ants *
• Almost $400,000 went to Univ. of New York to pay students to drink beer and smoke marijuana for a study there *
• $219,000 to the Nat’l Institute of Health to study if young people “hook-up” after getting drunk *
• $210,000 to the Univ. of Hawaii to study bees *
• $700,000 to crab fishermen in Oregon to pay for lost crab pots *
• $5,000 a person tax rebate if you buy a new electric golf cart (Wall Street Journal)
• Up to $1 million went to prisoners in $250 stimulus checks (FoxNews)
• $54 mil to a New York Indian tribe to run its casino (New York Post)
• $1 billion for a power plant in Mattoon, Illinois that is based on speculative science and may not even work **
• $15 million to back-road bridges that get little traffic in Wisconsin **
• $800,000 for a practically unused airport in Pennsylvania **
• $3.4 million for an animal walk way under a road in Florida **
• $1.15 million to install a guard rail for a lake that doesn’t even exist in Oklahoma **
• $10 million to renovate a rail station that has stood unused for a decade **
• $578,000 to battle homelessness in Union, New York even though the town says they have no homeless people there **
• $233,000 to the Univ. of Calif. to study why Africans vote… in Africa ***
• $2 million to build a new fire house in a Nevada town that has no firemen ***
• North Carolina schools got $4.4 million for literacy and math coaches… to teach their teachers! ***
• $54 million for a railroad project in Napa Valley went to a minority-owned company that then hired a local construction company for half the price, pocketing the rest ***
• A California company was given $15 million in stimulus money to monitor water quality in a stream it was under indictment for polluting previously***

(more…)

This whole debate about government stimulus versus austerity, and the impact of these policies on economic growth, misses a key point: It is business, not government, that creates jobs.

The economic power of business is the missing link in the faux debate that is now raging over spending and deficit policies. A brief look at the recent jobs report for June tells this story. After spending more than $1 trillion through so-called government stimulus, we are at best experiencing a grinding and anemic jobs recovery. Private payrolls are growing slowly. The workweek is again shrinking. And average hourly earnings have declined. The unemployment rate dropped to 9.5 percent, but that’s because 650,000 people left the labor force.

Most troubling, the household survey, which captures small owner-operated business employment, dropped 300,000 following a decline last month. In other words, this leading indicator is moving in the wrong direction. More generally, recent economic data suggest that the rate of recovery could be slowing to only 2 percent, or even less. Some fear a double-dip recession.

So what about all this stimulus spending? Well, it hasn’t worked.

(more…)

Allan Meltzer dissects Obama’s economic policy in today’s Wall Street Journal:

The administration’s stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they inherited as a way of avoiding responsibility for the 18 months for which they are responsible.

But they want new stimulus measures—which is convincing evidence that they too recognize that the earlier measures failed. And so the U.S. was odd-man out at the G-20 meeting over the weekend, continuing to call for more government spending in the face of European resistance.

The contrast with President Reagan’s antirecession and pro-growth measures in 1981 is striking. Reagan reduced marginal and corporate tax rates and slowed the growth of nondefense spending. Recovery began about a year later. After 18 months, the economy grew more than 9% and it continued to expand above trend rates.

(more…)

Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will not take up the Senate’s “doc fix” bill, which passed through the Senate on Friday.  A letter from Pelosi reaffirms her position and scolds Republicans for blocking the jobs portion of the bill:

“What is it that Republicans in the Senate and House don’t understand about the need for jobs in America? I see no reason to pass this inadequate bill until we see jobs legislation coming out of the Senate. House Democrats are saying to Republicans in the Senate: Show us the jobs!”

It’s humorous to hear Pelosi whine on this–if my memory is correct the Democrats control both Chambers and passed the $787 billion stimulus bill to create ” jobs, jobs, jobs.”  More than one year later, we now know that the “stimulus failed,” and a second $17 billion stimlus/jobs bill was passed–which somehow still is not enough.

So, we have more than $800 billion in stimulus spending “designed” to create jobs and now Pelosi has the audacity to blame the GOP after the two previous massive, generational-theft stimulus bills failed.  Are you kidding, Nan?

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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:

(more…)

In March 2010, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University released a study about President Obama’s stimulus package.  It contained many informational gems:

• Public entities received 42 percent of awards under the stimulus package, but received over half of dollars awarded (meaning they got larger chunks of change than private contractors);
• Even according to the administration, $285,814.61 was spent to create each job under the stimulus;
• On average, Democratic districts received 1.53 times the amount of awards that Republicans were granted, with Democratic districts receiving 2.65 times the amount of stimulus dollars Republican districts received.  Democratic districts received 73 percent of the total stimulus funds awarded, and Republican districts received 27 percent of the total amount awarded.

De Rugy claimed that “a district’s representation by a Republican decreases the stimulus funds awarded to it by 41.7 percent.”  She also found that unemployment did not correlate with stimulus funds received.  In other words, much of the money under the stimulus was directed at Democratic districts for political reasons.

The mere suggestion that politics had anything to do with allocations under the stimulus got the journalistic left’s panties in a wad.  Some of the criticism of de Rugy’s study was worthwhile.  Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com pointed out that de Rugy had not taken into account the fact that cash was allocated largely to districts containing state capitols, since money allocated to states generally flows through state capitols (which are overwhelmingly represented by Democrats).  There is something to be said for this criticism, of course, which is why de Rugy proceeded to re-run the study taking into account the effect of allocations to state capitols – and found that the average Democratic district still gets 30 percent more cash than the average Republican district.

(more…)

Last month, Phil Kerpen wrote an insightful piece here at BigGovernment.com about “The Stimulus Bill’s Hidden Attack on What We Eat, Drink, and Smoke.” In it, he detailed yet another absurd (and angering) use of so-called “stimulus” funds to help lobby for restrictions and higher taxes on the nanny state’s favorite targets: unhealthy foods, sweetened beverages, tobacco, and other disfavored products that your friendly bureaucrat doesn’t think you ought to enjoy. Digging through the Health and Human Services Department’s stimulus website raises some serious questions about the $650 million in taxpayer money being spent on this program, called “Communities Putting Prevention to Work” (CPPW).

Several grant descriptions suggest that this funding may be in violation of guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, through which the CPPW program is administered. The CDC’s lobbying restriction guideline states in part that, “no part of CDC appropriated funds, shall be used…to support or defeat legislation pending before the Congress or any State or local legislature.” And yet, that’s exactly what several of the grantees plan to use the money for.

For example, Jefferson County, Alabama plans to spend $7 million on a “tobacco use prevention and cessation initiative [that] will promote changes in policies to reduce smoking opportunities and reduce access to tobacco products.” Pretty straightforward, that. They plan to lobby for more smoking bans and restricting access to legal tobacco products.

New York City, for its part, plans to spend $15.5 million “work[ing] to set policies and create environments that reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and overly salted foods.” One New York legislator is already trying to “create an environment” where restaurants are prohibited by law from using SALT in their food. Yes, salt, the substance without which virtually every food on Earth would be inedible.

Perhaps my favorite, our nation’s capital is spending $4.9 million on a program called “LiveWell DC,” which will “explore limiting tobacco access through zoning/license restrictions, restrict point-of-purchase advertising of tobacco products, support the elimination of price discounts, and provide social support through quitline and other cessation services.” Quite the laundry list there.

(more…)

Yesterday The Hill reported  that Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that “keeping a Democratic majority in the House is ‘too important to the country,’” which is why “she had no intention of ceding control of the House in this fall’s elections, despite Republican optimism that they can win control of the chamber.” Appearing on PBS, Pelosi addressed potential Democratic losses due to Sunday’s health care vote, “I’ve said if passing this bill means I have to walk out of my office that night, it would be with the greatest pride.” However, she cautioned, “I haven’t any intention of losing the Democratic majority.”

Sure. Here is another reason Mrs. Pelosi might want to keep a democratic majority. That’s because, as it turns out, based on my new analysis of the Recovery.org data, Democratic districts are getting 1.8 times more money on average than Republican districts. Using Recovery.gov data, and cleaning it up seriously to be able to use it, we find that Republican districts are getting on average $260.6 million in stimulus awards while democratic districts are getting on average $471.5 million. The average is award per district is $385.9 million.

(more…)