Recovery Act One Year Progress Report
UPDATE: This week President Obama began a campaign style tour to hype the “success” of the Recovery Act or “stimulus.” He said without it there would heave been “a catastrophe.” But he did not provide any details as to the nature of the catastrophe. Considering the data below it’s pretty difficult to characterize employment as anything other than a catastrophe.
This week marks one year since the “stimulus” or Recovery Act, $787 Billion of extra borrowing and spending, was enacted by Congress. The President continues to make the preposterous claim that “every economist” agrees the stimulus created millions of jobs.
It’s time for an objective progress report.
A year ago President Obama orchestrated weeks of political-media hype leading up the the Congressional vote, and promised:
I have moved quickly with my economic team and leaders of both parties on an American Recovery Act that will immediately jumpstart job creation and long term growth.
The headline from the January jobs report was that all employers, including both government and private sector, shed 20,000 jobs in January. What didn’t make the headlines was that the federal government added 19,000 jobs. So the real economy, that the government loots to gain the resources to provide government jobs, actually lost 39,000 jobs.
Since the recovery act was enacted:
- the private sector has lost 3.8 million jobs,
- the federal government has added 113,000 jobs.
The political-media establishment is now promoting a second round of stimulus borrowing and spending, this time calling it a “jobs bill,” while continuing to threaten small business employers with:
- Punitive tax increases,
- An artificial energy shortage imposed by government in order to increase energy costs
- New taxes on energy production,
- New health care mandates,
- A new federal law that would force unionization upon employers and employees who don’t want union.
Here is reality(and note, thousand brain cells on his/her best day is nowhere to be found.)
Small to medium sized business owners are scared to death of what this administration is going to do about taxes and increasing the cost of employing people. This is what you’re seeing in the unemployment numbers. And no amount of spinning is going to change the view of people who are actually in control of creating jobs.
Until the Obama administration is willing to admit that its policies are in fact destructive to job creation, we are going to have an unemployment rate that fluctuates between 9% and 11%, officially. And who knows what the real unemployment rate is.
This is senseless, needless, and so unfortunate. All of all of you who voted for Obama, how do you justify your moral position today?