It is difficult to properly calculate the effects of the 2009 ARRA bill, as it was a nation-wide program. Though employment and growth failed to respond to ARRA as the Administration had suggested, fiscal stimulus advocates have argued that employment levels would have been lower still without the program.

Wilson’s study makes an important contribution to this debate by focusing on state-by-state comparisons. A large portion of stimulus funding at the state level was based on criteria that were entirely independent of the economic situation that states faced. For example, the number of existing highway miles was used to calculate additional transportation spending.

The study uses this resulting variation in state-level stimulus funding to determine what impact ARRA funding had on employment — including both the direct impact of workers hired to complete planned projects, as well as any broader spillover effects resulting from greater government spending. Administration economists have repeatedly emphasized the importance of this indirect employment growth in driving economic recovery.

The results suggest that though the program did result in 2 million jobs “created or saved” by March 2010, net job creation was statistically indistinguishable from zero by August of this year. Taken at face value, this would suggest that the stimulus program (with an overall cost of $814 billion) worked only to generate temporary jobs at a cost of over $400,000 per worker. Even if the stimulus had in fact generated this level of employment as a durable outcome, it would still have been an extremely expensive way to generate employment.

Well, all anyone needed to do was look at unemployment over the last 19 months to figure that much out.  We have had 19 months of joblessness at 9% or higher, a record in the post-WWII era, despite the administration’s insistence that the outlay would curtail the extension of unemployment.  That number is lower than it should be, thanks to a generational low in the workforce-to-population ratio, too.  The number of the unemployed and discouraged workers didn’t drop; in fact, those numbers have grown since Porkulus.

The rebuttal from the White House has been to argue the counterfactual.  Just imagine, they say, if we hadn’t spend $800 billion in stimulus! The analysis by e21 addresses that argument as well:

It is also difficult to determine the counterfactual employment growth that would have resulted in the absence of the fiscal stimulus law. To address this issue, Wilson includes other variables predictive of future employment growth. However, it is possible that employment would indeed have been worse in all states without a stimulus. It is also possible that employment would have been better than projected — for instance, if the Fed or Treasury had responded to higher unemployment through their own interventions.

Still, this result should be taken seriously, as it represents one of the few actual analyses of the stimulus program that does not rely on outdated multiplier estimates that assume their result.

Importantly, the results are also consistent with another recent analysis of government spending during Great Depression by economists Price Fishback and Valentina Kachanovskaya. During a period in which unemployment was extremely high and the costs of implementing a public works program were far lower than today, one might expect that fiscal stimulus might have proven more effective. Yet Fishback and Kachanovskaya find that a similar state-by-state analysis suggests that fiscal stimulus during the Great Depression failed to yield durable employment gains.

But Reason notes that the people pushing the counterfactual never provided any reality-based metrics in the first place:

Backers of the stimulus have always had to contend with two big problems: The first is measurement. How do we know how many jobs were created, saved, funded, whatever? Do we count new permanent jobs, or partially funded contractors, or grocery clerks whose paychecks are dependent on added business from stimulus-funded workers across town? And even if you can verify that those jobs are funded by stimulus money somehow, how do you know that the same jobs would not have been created in the absence of the stimulus? It’s a thankless task, and the administration has tended to respond by skirting the issue and relying on models that don’t really measure output at all. Wilson’s study, with its state-by-state comparisons, attempts to partly address this problem.

But his tentative conclusions lead to the second problem, which is value. Even if you find  that the stimulus did create jobs, then the question becomes: Were the results worth the price? The findings in Wilson’s study suggest that they weren’t.

Finally, we come to the basic argument used by the administration, which was that the stimulus was intended to prevent joblessness from going above 8%.  Now that we’re heading back towards 10% having never gotten below 9%, that should certify the program as a flop.  The White House and its defenders claim that no one knew how bad the economy was at that point (January 2009), but that’s simply not true.  We had already lost over 3 million jobs by that time, and we were losing 600K a month or more by then.  If all the President’s men and women couldn’t have figured out that the economy was in very bad shape, driven there mainly by the collapse of a bubble itself driven by government interventions, then we certainly can question their expertise in crafting a solution that ended up doing nothing — and costing us a lot of money in the process with yet another government intervention.

The real question at the end of the day is this: opportunity costs.  Had the government acted to restrain regulatory growth and allow investors to keep an extra $800 billion in early 2009, would we have created more net jobs by August 2010 than zero?

- via hot air -

You know why McCain is taking his current stance against repealing “don’t ask,don’t tell”…it’s the SAME reason that the Republicans consistently vote against ANYTHING that the President proposes…they don’t want this President to succeed!!! It’s as simple as that. They don’t care about the economy..the country..or “the people”..all they care about is POWER and they want it back!!! Ergo..they blame President Obama for EVERYTHING and give him credit for NOTHING !!! This has never happened to a president before…….we know the real reason why….which is too bad !!!!!1   

Kelvin D. Filer

There you have it.

Before introducing President Barack Obama at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser in Minneapolis on Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi bemoaned the massive amount of money that shadowy conservative third-party groups have poured into this year’s election.

“Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where — because they won’t disclose it — is pouring in,” the California Democrat told about 100 donors at the fundraiser, according to a White House pool reporter in attendance.

The fundraiser, held at the 119-year-old Van Dusen Mansion on the National Register of Historic Places, was expected to raise $600,000, Democrats said. Guests dined and VIPs were greeted by Obama in a photo line for the cost of $50,000 per couple.

A Democratic strategist told Politico that conservative outside money could mean the difference between a 35-seat pick-up and a 60-seat pick-up, which nicely anticipates the liberal day-after spin to come. If the GOP nets, say, 70 seats, half of the gain will be blamed on the economy — pardon me, the “Bush-inherited” economy — and another 25 will be blamed on Karl Rove and the dirty, dirty foreigners who are bankrolling Republican PACs. And the other 10 seats? Why, that’ll be blamed on Fox News’s influence, of course. Damned Glenn Beck and his chalkboard.

Only one thing is certain, my friends: In no way will the stimulus or ObamaCare play any role in this election. Unless, of course, GOP gains are less than expected, in which case then they’ll be credited with having saved the Democrats’ majority. Speaking of which, below you’ll find another Pelosi bon mot to savor; click the image to watch and then choose the video clip titled “Pelosi on Voter Discontent.” Actual quote: “We haven’t really gotten the credit for what we have done.”

-via hot air-

Given how much stuff was coming at us… we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular.

This statement is the equivalent of those smarmy Eddie Haskell-like characters who, when asked what their greatest weakness is, claim “I guess it’s that I just work too darn hard” or “I care too much about other people”. Give me a break. I’m, admittedly, become increasingly intolerant of politi-speak. It’s just such a grotesque, stomach-turning Kabuki dance of back patting BS.

Is there anyone on earth who honestly believes this president has not spent enough time marketing his ideas to the public? When is the guy NOT on the stump or in front of a teleprompter or on television?

More importantly, I don’t think there’s any honest reformer from the “Right” or “Left” who believes he’s gotten any of these policies “right”. Obamacare was a shocking embarrassment of political payola and back-room dealings with the biggest companies around. The Frank/Dodd financial regulations bill is universally considered to be a failure in ending “Too Big To Fail”, the single biggest issue in our financial crisis outside of easy money from the Fed. Both are inelegant Rube Goldberg machines which the public has been told must be passed before they can discover what magic awaits inside their epic stack of unread paper.

This guy is a machine politician. Nothing more. That he’s incredibly confident, chilled out and like-able even as he blatantly lies simply makes him a very good machine politician.

But the real kicker of page one on this article, and it is something which instantly contradicts his claims about getting the policy right is his admission that a central marketing line for the so-called “stimulus” bill was a fraud:

He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works.

Lovely. Obama has spent his life almost entirely in either academia, the public sector or non-profit groups seeking rents from the public sector. Now, after three trillion plus in deficit spending over two years, the president suddenly realizes that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects”. Come on! Does anyone believe this is credible? And, um, what happened to “getting the policy right”? Virtually the entire justification for the “stimulus” outside of technocratic keynesian blather about “aggregate demand” was the steadily repeated claim that there were mountains of “shovel-ready” projects which could employ our so-called “slack” resources at a taxpayer-friendly recession discount.

Instead of “shovel ready infrastructure”, as we all now see, the “stimulus” was spent entirely on bailing out public sector unions, buying votes in marginal democratic voting districts with often goofy pork, and generally swelling the federal government. For all the talk of infrastructure then and now, the “Stimulus” has spent only $2.4 Billion on federal infrastructure, or three-tenths of one percent of the bill’s massive $862 billion dollar price tag.

THAT is “getting the policy right”? What a sham.

It seems to me that the only thing “shovel ready” is the enormous pile bull and fraud generated by politicians like our president as they seek to enrich their cronies under the guise of Keynesian stimulus…

…but what the hell do I know?

-via but what the hell do I know-

this tool is now warning about Republican fearmongering in virtually the same breath as he’s doing his heavy-breathing routine about shadowy money flowing in from conservative PACs. I wonder if the hypocrisy of that is something he’s aware of and happy to wallow in or if his own messianic ego blinds him to it.

Gee, I wonder why he left foreign money out of it this time. Oh, that’s right… because Democrats take twice as much foreign money as Republicans.

And let’s not ignore the fact that while Democrats are now trying to demonize the source of Republican funding – while completely glossing over the foreign source of funding for Democrats – that one of the star Democrats, Harry Reid, has received almost 25% of his campaign contributi0ns from special interest groups while his rival, Sharron Angle, has recieved 2% from special interests.  Over $4.5 million for Reid, $88,000 for Angle. 

Even with facts like these the left still cries that Republicans are in the pockets of big business and special interest groups.

And we will see a terrible price that we will pay years down the road for letting our children down when they need us the absolute most.  I’m not going to be part of that, so every minute that I have here is going to be spent debunking the myth that this country’s in debt and we just can’t spend.

Well, that’s certainly a new approach. Or perhaps not; remember in 2005 when Democrats insisted that Social Security didn’t need reform? Do not trouble us with your silly mathematics, Hare and the Democrats are telling voters. That massive red ink that we’re creating isn’t debt at all — it’s, er … um … performance art! Yeah, that’s it!

Meanwhile, the people who will have to pay for the massive amounts of red ink will be those same children that Hare claims he’s protecting, or to me even more accurate, the children, their children, and their children’s children. National debt and deficits are no myth, but what is clearly mythical is the legend of the fiscally responsible Democrat.