Feb

Stimulus Report: Less than 600K employees paid with Porkulus funds

Team Obama repeats over and over again that Porkulus “saved or created” anywhere from one to two million jobs. But their own stimulus report indicates less than 600,000 employees have been paid with stimulus funds. How many of those were “saved or created” I don’t know. Would they have kept their jobs without Porkulus? I guess we’ll never know.

WSJ: Recipients of economic-stimulus money said 599,108 workers were being paid by the funds in the last quarter of 2009, fewer than the number of jobs attributed to the package in the seven months after it was enacted.

The recipients’ reports, published on the official government Web site recovery.gov late Saturday, are likely to fuel further controversy over the impact of the $787 billion package, as Democrats craft new jobs-creation proposals to address the country’s 10% jobless rate. Many opinion polls suggest that most voters don’t believe the current stimulus program, which was passed last February, is working.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, said the administration was seeking a jobs bill that would cost approximately $100 billion. “The president hopes that the next order of business the Senate will take up is this package,” he said.

The administration could face difficulty explaining how the reports square with its own calculations that the plan kept between 1.5 million and two million jobs in the economy through the end of 2009.

In his State of the Union address to Congress last week, President Barack Obama said that “because of the steps we took, there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed.” ….

And now they want another stimulus. Good grief. How much debt can we take on before everything collapses?

Speaking of collapse, TARP SIG Neil Barofsky warns that the government’s “too big to fail” policy for the banks has created even more risk in the financial system. The old moral hazard will come back to bite us again. Great.

Update: A definite must read: The Grasping Hand: How the modern democratic state pillages its most productive citizens.

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