Heritage Foundation
Forget everything bad you’ve ever heard about President Barack Obama’s $787 economic stimulus. Combing through the data on the $18 million Recovery.gov website you’ll find tons of Obama stimulus success stories from across the country. In Minnesota’s 57th Congressional District, 35 jobs have been saved or created using $404,340 in stimulus funds. In New Mexico’s 22nd Congressional District, 25 jobs have been saved or created using $61,000 in stimulus cash. And in Arizona’s fighting 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending.
The it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-our-tax-dollars-at-stake punch line here is that none of the above Congressional Districts actually exist. Yet those jobs “created or saved” claims still sit on the Obama administration’s official “transparency and accountability” website Recovery.gov. As the Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso points out, it would have been nearly costless for the Recovery.gov site designers to limit the input fields so that non-existent Congressional Districts never made it into the public domain, but for whatever reason the Obama administration chose otherwise. Defending the fake data on his website, Recovery.gov Communications Director Ed Pound told ABC News: “We report what the recipients submit to us. Some recipients clearly don’t know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on job numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes.”
Pound is dead wrong. The problem with Recovery.gov is not human reporting error, but an error of human design. Highly trained professional economists don’t agree on how to tell when a job has been “saved or created” yet the Obama administration expects a Kentucky shoe-store owner to accurately create such data? “Just throwing in any number.” That just about sums up the accuracy of Recovery.gov. And the usually compliant mainstream press is beginning to notice.
The Washington Examiner has begun tracking stories from established media outlets on bogus job claims made by the Obama administration and they have already identified 75,343 fake jobs out of the 640,000 that the Obama administration claimed. You can track Obama job fakery from around the country on the Examiner’s interactive “Bogus Jobs” map here.
The lesson here is that the American people simply cannot trust any stimulus claims made by the Obama White House. Fortunately we have an objective way to hold Obama accountable.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics has been collecting accepted and standardized data employment data since the 1940s.
When President Obama was selling his $787 billion stimulus to the American people he promised unemployment would never rise above 7.8% and that by 2010 the U.S. economy would employ 138.6 million jobs. The unemployment rate is now 10.2% and with only 130.8 million jobs in the U.S. economy, President Obama is now 7.8 million jobs short of what he promised the American people. That makes President Obama’s stimulus an objective failure.
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