The $825B & $447B Economic Stimulus Packages

[AMDScooter]

Who is ready for "recover bummer" part III?? No rumors of "funempolyment" from the MSM as of this writing...

BLS Jobs Report: +54,000, Unemployment +9.1%; Awful at First Glance, Merely Bad Beneath the Surface

Thoughts on the Jobs Report Thoughts on the Jobs Report

Last month I commented that on the surface the job reports was the "best back-to-back reports we have seen for years", not as measured by a typical recovery but as measured by this so-called recovery. Beneath the surface things were awful.

This month things are awful at first glance and simply bad beneath the surface. The number of employed rose by 105,000 which is an anemic number, but for the first time in a long time those in the labor force rose by a considerable amount: 272,000.

That suggests, momentarily that people think there may be jobs and are looking for them. That is a good thing, except for the fact they are not finding jobs. The number of unemployed rose by 167,000 and the unemployment rate ticked up by .1% to 9.1%.

Economists projected a drop to 8.9%, I called for a rise to 9.2%.

For the last two months I commented "It is very questionable if this pace of jobs keeps up." Clearly it didn't and this certainly cannot all be blamed on a Tsunami in Japan. The entire global economy is slowing rapidly.

Mish on Yahoo Finance Daily Ticker on Slowing Global Economy; U.S. Manufacturing ISM Plunge; Order Backlog and New Orders Barely Above Contraction

China's Manufacturing Slowest in 9 Months, New Orders Suggest Manufacturing May Have Already Peaked; Australia Biggest GDP Drop in 20 Years

Recall that the unemployment rate varies in accordance with the Household Survey not the reported headline jobs number, and not in accordance with the weekly claims data.

Digging deeper into the Household Survey, we see some more interesting data. In the last year, the civilian population rose by 1,814,000. Yet the labor force dropped by 544,000. Those not in the labor force rose by 2,358,000.

In January alone, a whopping 319,000 people dropped out of the workforce. In February another 87,000 people dropped out of the labor force. In March 11,000 people dropped out of the labor force. In April, 131,000 dropped out of the labor force.

At long last, the labor force expanded. This month it rose by 272,000. The 5-month total for 2011 is +276,000.

Many of those millions who dropped out of the workforce would start looking if they thought jobs were available. Indeed, in a 2-year old recovery, the labor force should be rising sharply as those who stopped looking for jobs, once again started looking. Instead, an additional 276,000 people dropped out of the labor force in the first four months of the year.

Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the unemployment rate would be well over 11%.

I do not know if this is a one-month anomaly with the labor force rising. However, if it continues (and that would be a good thing), it will be very difficult for the unemployment rate to drop.

April 2011 Jobs Report

Please consider the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) May 2011 Employment Report.

Nonfarm payroll employment changed little (+54,000) in May, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains continued in professional and business services, health care, and mining. Employment levels in other major private-sector industries were little changed, and local government employment continued to decline.

Unemployment Rate - Seasonally Adjusted


More . . .

[AMDScooter]

Better fire up the "things would have been much worse...." machine. Reality claims yet another victim.

Romer-Bernstein unemployment chart — updated

The good folks at e21 have updated the wildly optimistic chart from January 2009 prepared by incoming White House economists Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer. You know, the one that show the Obama stimulus plan would keep unemployment from hitting 8 percent.

[AMDScooter]

Whoops.. unemployment remaining un~"stimulated" despite nearly a cool trillion put on our grand kids backs.

Expect the Unexpected: Jobless Claims Rise Again
Department of Redundancy Department



Revisiting the Obama administration’s unemployment promise

The folks at e21 remind us of something that should be at the forefront of every person’s memory as they consider what this administration has and hasn’t accomplished in its promise to “stimulate” the economy and create jobs. I call it the “big promise”. I don’t call it a “lie” since I use the traditional definition of a lie (a known falsehood) vs. the more modern one in use today by activists on both sides (being wrong about something). But that’s fodder for a future post.

In this one I want to issue a reminder of what was promised and what has been delivered. Promise:

Back in January 2009, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein produced a report estimating future unemployment rates with and without a stimulus plan. Their estimates, which were widely circulated, projected that unemployment would approach 9% without a stimulus, but would never exceed 8% with the plan.

They got their “stimulus” – $800 plus billion in mostly borrowed money with which they were to stem the tide of unemployment then rising and keep it under 8% as promised.

Result?





The result wasn’t even close. In fact, other than two months of this year, the unemployment rate has stayed above 9%. By this time, according to the administrations plan, we were told we’d be at about 6.5%.

So it is clear that the “plan” was a total and unmitigated but costly failure.

What’s their explanation for such a huge miscalculation?

Romer and Bernstein defend their estimates with the argument that the economic situation turned out worse than they had anticipated; and so the economy would have done even worse without a stimulus.

Is that so? Then, as e21 says, they owe us a much deeper explanation of why that was so and why they considered their solution at the time to be the proper thing to do. Because it is seeming more and more like a very expensive boondoggle at the moment:

The recession “officially” ended two years ago, yet the first quarter of 2011 only saw 1.8% growth. The Administration and Congress should have a more robust discussion about their self-proclaimed “2010 Recovery Summer” – if for no other reason than to better inform the public about the recovery challenges the U.S. still faces in 2011.

For example, there is new research that suggests that the stimulus may actually have resulted in a net loss of jobs. Regardless of the exact number of jobs lost or created, however, the fact that some economists are even arguing that it had a negative impact tells you that the stimulus may very well have been a wash overall.

Larry Lindsey offered his own review of the stimulus this week, arguing that it failed what’s colloquially known as the Sharp Pencil Test. As he explains, “if you sit down and do a back of the envelope calculation of the [stimulus] program’s costs and benefits, there is no way to conjure up numbers that allow it to make sense.”

Lindsey went on to offer this analysis:

[E]ven if you buy the White House’s argument that the $800 billion package created 3 million jobs, that works out to $266,000 per job. Taxing or borrowing $266,000 from the private sector to create a single job is simply not a cost effective way of putting America back to work. The long-term debt burden of that $266,000 swamps any benefit that the single job created might provide.

The 3 million claim is dubious at best with no mention of the type, quality or sector these jobs were supposed “saved or created” (the stimulus propped up a lot of state budgets which helped delay layoffs to government workers). And as Lindsey points out, the cost of what can only be a temporary “save” are way out of whack with the benefit. Instead, it appears the stimulus was a giant waste of money that did little if anything to create jobs in the private sector and mostly benefited government at a huge cost per job.

I’m not sure how anyone could economically justify such an outcome. But I sure would like to hear them try. I think they owe us some answers on this. And I’d like to see the GOP begin asking those questions. This is one part of the Obama record they need to pound on – starting now.

[AMDScooter]

P-Turtle is a laugh riot...

Yuk-Yuk… Obama Jokes About His Stimulus Failing to Produce Any Shovel Ready Jobs (Video)

What a hoot.
Master of Disaster Barack Obama joked today that his stimulus failed to produce any shovel ready jobs.
Yuk-Yuk.
Via FOX Nation:


FOX Nation reported:
President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness met today in Durham, NC at Cree Inc., a company that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting. One of the Council’s recommendations to President Obama was to streamline the federal permit process for construction and infrastructure projects. It was explained to Obama that the permitting process can delay projects for “months to years … and in many cases even cause projects to be abandoned … I’m sure that when you implemented the Recovery Act your staff briefed you on many of these challenges.” At this point, Obama smiled and interjected, “Shovel-ready was not as … uh .. shovel-ready as we expected.”

[AMDScooter]

Your tax $$$ hard at work making $127 bulbs...

Obama Visits NC Plant That Used $39 Million Stimulus to Make $127 Light Bulbs and Pays CEO $4.2 Million

[SteveW]

Your tax $$$ hard at work making $127 bulbs...

Obama Visits NC Plant That Used $39 Million Stimulus to Make $127 Light Bulbs and Pays CEO $4.2 Million

Yet another fine example of those urgent "Shovel Ready" jobs Obambi and his cronies created......

[kbohip]

Your tax $$$ hard at work making $127 bulbs...

Obama Visits NC Plant That Used $39 Million Stimulus to Make $127 Light Bulbs and Pays CEO $4.2 Million

All I can say is thank God the Chinese won't ever figure out how to make led bulbs for less money! Seriously, without a tariff on "green" products from China, our "Green" industry will hold up to competition from China as well as our television manufacturers did in the 80's.

[AMDScooter]

Derp...

[AMDScooter]

Old news confirmed yet again...

Confirmed: Obama Stimulus Did Not Lift US Out of Depression… But It Did Triple the Deficit

Recent data confirms that the Obama-Pelosi $787 billion stimulus plan did not lift the US out of a depression.
Investor’s Business Daily reported:

It has become a common refrain at the White House and among administration supporters that President Obama’s aggressive efforts to stimulate growth prevented an economic catastrophe.

“We had to hit the ground running and do everything we could to prevent a second Great Depression,” Obama told supporters last week.

Politically, the claim makes sense. Casting the challenge Obama faced as immense can help explain the economy’s lackluster performance in the two years since the recession officially ended.

But is it an accurate portrayal of what really happened?…

…The argument is often made that the recession turned out to be far worse than anyone knew at the time. But various indicators show that the economy had pretty much hit bottom at the end of 2008 — a month before President Obama took office.

Monthly GDP, for example, stopped free-falling in December 2008, long before the stimulus kicked in, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. (See nearby chart.) Monthly job losses bottomed out in early 2009 while the Index of Leading Economic Indicators started to rise in April.

The stimulus timing is off.

When the recession officially ended in June 2009, just 15% of the stimulus money had gone out the door. And that figure’s likely inflated, since almost a third of the money was in the form of grants to states, which some studies suggest they didn’t spend, but used to pay down debt.

Other programs Obama often touts — Cash for Clunkers, mortgage help, homebuyer tax credits, the auto rescue plans — either came as the recession had ended or was ending or were widely deemed to be busts.

But, the stimulus did accomplish something…
Obama was able to triple the deficit in one year.

Obama said he was going to cut the deficit in half back in 2009. Instead he tripled it his first year in office and it’s only getting worse.

The Obama deficit this year may reach $1.65 trillion. (The Captain’s Comments)
The stimulus did accomplish that much anyway.

[AMDScooter]

Just how big a failure was the porkulus??

Obama's The One? How About Obama's the 0.8

Obama's The One? How About Obama's the 0.8
Recovery Bummer.

In a report entitled "Unchartered Depths," the Committee finds that "employment is now 5.0% below what it was at the start of the recession, 38 months ago. This compares to an average rise in employment of 3.7% over the same period in prior post-WWII recessions." [Emphasis added and do note he's not talking about the unemployment rate but total employment, that is, workforce as a fraction of total population -- ace]
On economic growth, real GDP has risen 0.8% over the 13 quarters since the recession began, compared to an average increase of 9.9% in past recoveries. From the beginning of the recession to April 2011, real personal income has grown just .9% compared to 9.4% for the same period in previous post 1960 recessions. [I do not know the exact definition of "real GDP" he means but I would guess it's the standard figure, less inflationary growth and probably less population growth, too. In any event, you can see the wide disparity between Obama's real GDP growth figure and the average real GDP growth in actual recoveries -- ace.]

The standard response from Obama apologists is that recession of 2008 and 2009 was different because, as former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro puts it, "this was a financial crisis, and these take longer to recover from." In fact, in most cases, the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery to make up for lost ground.

That was what Ronald Reagan's critics said when the U.S. economy soared during 1983 and 1984 with quarterly growth numbers exceeding 7%. At the time, liberal Keynesians yawned and declared the good times nothing more than a normal snapback from the deep recession.

On the plus side, Obama reads the shit out of a TelePrompTer at 8.8% increase over most presidents in a post-recession economy.

Dean Vernon Wormer Comments:

Zero point eight. It's more than a little below par, Mr. Obama. IT STINKS! It's the lowest on campus. It's the lowest in Faber history!

Boy, I am not feeling well, to keep missing these references that are just there for the plucking.

I Was Told There Would Be No Math In This Presidency: Crossroads PAC, a Karl Rove joint, starts a big-money tv ad campaign on... the economy, stupid.

And for this we paid nearly a trillion bucks...

[Keven]

Speaking of Karl Rove....

He did a piece in the WSJ saying that Obama is toast. Yes, he's a Republican but he's also a political genius.

He pointed out that no President has been reelected for a second term with a higher unemployment rate than when he took office since FDR.

So, unless Obama can "save or create" jobs and get the unemployment rate down to below 8.2% (which it was in January 2008), then he could be in trouble.

I thought Obama would get reelected easily because of the "racial goodwill" he has (that's the politically correct term for saying "black people vote for Obama because he's black") and because there's a lot of people who aren't paying attention who think he's doing a great job. But, this economy is going nowhere, and I think the average American is starting to notice.

[AMDScooter]

Inflation.. unemployment.. huge deficit.. rising energy prices.. etc.. people are going to be far less enamored by the novelty of electing an clueless black guy for a second term with the growing list of failures he's got in his prezidential portfolio.





On a related note... I drive by this half billion dollar Obami payoff on a pretty regular basis. Plenty of space on the side of I-880 for a billboard showing where your tax bucks went to pay off P-Turtle's pals.

Panel: Green jobs company endorsed by Obama and Biden squandered $535 million in stimulus money

Solyndra, Inc. was supposed to have showcased the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s stimulus and green jobs initiatives, but instead it has become the center of congressional attention for waste, fraud and abuse of such programs.

According to a Feb. 17 letter signed by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Michigan Republican, and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, Florida Republican, to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Fremont, Calif.-based solar panel manufacturer should never have received a $535 million loan guarantee from the stimulus.*

The company became the first recipient of an Energy Department loan guarantee under the stimulus in March 2009, which was intended to “finance construction of the first phase of the company’s new manufacturing facility” for photovoltaic solar panels.

The Energy Department estimated in a March 20, 2009 press release that the loan guarantee would create 3,000 construction jobs and a further 1,000 jobs after the plant opened.

And President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden each personally showcased Solyndra as an example of how stimulus dollars were at work creating jobs, during appearances at the company over the course of the following year.

Biden personally announced the closure of Solyndra’s $535 million loan guarantee in a Sept. 9, 2009 speech, delivered via closed-circuit television, on the occasion of the groundbreaking of the plant.

The vice president justified the federal government’s investment in Solyndra in front of employees and other dignitaries, including Secretary Chu and former Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger, saying the jobs the company intended to create would “serve as a foundation for a stronger American economy.”

“These jobs are the jobs that are going to define the 21st century that will allow America to compete and to lead like we did in the 20th century,” Biden said.

According to Biden’s speech, the $535 million loan guarantee was a smaller part of the $30 billion of stimulus money the administration planned to spend as part of its Green Jobs Initiative.

Obama made similar claims in a May 26, 2010 speech at the plant, but the 1,000 jobs he and Biden touted in their respective speeches failed to materialize.

Instead, Solyndra announced on Nov. 3 it planned to postpone expanding the plant, which put the taxpayers on the hook to the tune of $390.5 million taxpayers**, or 73 percent of the total loan guarantee, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It also announced that it no longer planned to hire the 1,000 workers that Obama and Biden had touted in their speeches and that it planned to close one of its older factories and planned to lay-off 135 temporary or contract workers and 40 full-time employees.

A closer look at the company shows it has never turned a profit since it was founded in 2005, according to its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.

And Solyndra’s auditor declared that “the company has suffered recurring losses, negative cash flows since inception and has a net stockholders’ deficit that, among other factors, [that] raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a growing concern” in a March 2010 amendment to its SEC registration statement.

“While we understand the purpose of the Loan Guarantee Program is to help private companies engaging in clean energy products to obtain financing by providing loan guarantees, subsequent events raise questions about Solyndra was the right candidate to receive a loan guarantee in excess of half a billion dollars,” Upton and Stearns wrote.

A June 2010 Wall Street Journal report indicating that Solyndra’s majority owner, Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, was a major fundraiser for the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign has stimulus opponents such as Citizens Against Government Waste crying foul.

“We have said this is pork-barrel spending since the beginning,” Leslie Page, spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, told The Daily Caller. “And the one thing about pork is its corruptive influences.”

Kaiser flatly denied he had anything to do with the loan guarantee when he was asked by the Journal, but Page nonetheless sees cronyism in the loan guarantee because personal involvement of the president and vice president in the project.

“This seems like a quid pro quo, and it raises a lot of questions,” Page said.

Other stimulus critics say Solyndra shows just how flawed the program has been from the beginning and how it has failed to create jobs and needs further oversight.

“It would have been a lot more effective to put money into the hands of the private sector,” said Alex Cortes, chairman of the Restore the Dream Foundation and DefundIt.org. “This is just another example of the failure of the stimulus.”

Solyndra is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Cortes, who plans to raise awareness of other stimulus pork projects such as an approximately $800,000 television ad campaign in New York aimed at promoting healthy eating habits.

“While that’s all well and good … it doesn’t do anything to create jobs,” Cortes said.

And Mattie Corrao, government affairs manager with Americans for Tax Reform, said the Solyndra loan shows how hollow Obama’s promise to keep close track over how stimulus money has been spent has been.

“[The administration] is trying to pretend we’re creating jobs and hoping the taxpayers are dumb enough and blind enough to believe the lie,” Corrao said. “But after two years of unemployment about 9 percent, people aren’t going to believe it anymore.”

Solyndra did not respond to a request for comments.

*Correction: The sentence originally stated the money was squandered.

**Correction: The article originally stated the postponement cost $390.5 million, instead of put the taxpayers on the hook for $390.5 million.

Hopenchange..... suckers.

[AMDScooter]

Friday dump hoping no one would notice...

Obama’s Economists: ‘Stimulus’ Has Cost $278,000 per Job
The stimulus is now causing the economy to shed jobs.

When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.

The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.

Furthermore, the council reports that, as of two quarters ago, the “stimulus” had added or saved just under 2.7 million jobs — or 288,000 more than it has now. In other words, over the past six months, the economy would have added or saved more jobs without the “stimulus” than it has with it. In comparison to how things would otherwise have been, the “stimulus” has been working in reverse over the past six months, causing the economy to shed jobs.

Again, this is the verdict of Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisors, which is about as much of a home-field ruling as anyone could ever ask for. In truth, it’s quite possible that by borrowing an amount greater than the regular defense budget or the annual cost of Medicare, and then spending it mostly on Democratic constituencies rather than in a manner genuinely designed to stimulate the economy, Obama’s “stimulus” has actually undermined the economy’s recovery — while leaving us (thus far) $666 billion deeper in debt.

The actual employment numbers from the administration’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the unemployment rate was 7.3 percent when the “stimulus” was being debated. It has since risen to 9.1 percent. Meanwhile, the national debt at the end of 2008, when Obama was poised to take office, was $9.986 trillion (see Table S-9). It’s now $14.467 trillion — and counting.

All sides agree on these incriminating numbers — and now they also appear to agree on this important point: The economy would now be generating job growth at a faster rate if the Democrats hadn’t passed the “stimulus.”

[falcon_view]

^^^^But then the government wouldn't have been taking care of the banks. All the why and what for is in my sig, anything else is BS........ It is not a single party issue.

[SteveW]

^^^^But then the government wouldn't have been taking care of the banks. All the why and what for is in my sig, anything else is BS........ It is not a single party issue.

Yep, the concept of FDIC has been taken to dimension it was never intended to be. Now, with the government essentially underwriting the banks they can do no wrong. Whatever they do, if it fails, the government will come along and bail them out - on the backs of the taxpayers.......