The Obama administration can repeat as much as it wants that the stimulus spending has had a great impact on the economy, but it won’t change the truth. The government can’t create jobs. It’s an illusion. The main reason, beyond the inability of the government to do anything efficiently, is that the government doesn’t have money of its own. In order to spend money, it needs first to extract it from the private sector by borrowing it, taxing it, or printing it. Each of these options shrinks the private sector for the sake of growing the government.
And yet, when Dr. Romer, the chairman of Pres. Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, testified to the Joint Economic Committee last week on the economic crisis and the efficacy of the policy response, she pointed to (without evidence) 160,000 to 1.5 million “jobs saved or created,” a made-up metric if there ever was one, thanks to the stimulus.
She also seemed to have forgotten all about her entire life’s research, which showed that stimulus spending is not what got us out of the Great Depression.
Strangely, the Obama administration website, Recovery.gov, only reports 30,000 jobs created in the private sector. A document released last week by the White House also reports some 250,000 jobs created or saved in education. Interestingly, the document has a disclaimer that says that this number is not rooted on real data:
The report cites as evidence: “according to media reports and anecdotal accounts to the U.S. Department of Education over the past nine months”
“This information has not been officially submitted to the Department of Education nor certified by the agency. ARRA regulations only require states, not local or regional school districts, to collect, calculate, and report to the federal government on their use of these federal grants. Source consulted: Council of Great City Schools”
In other words, they have no clue. What we know, however, is that unemployment rate is still going up. Also we know that all but one state have suffered net job losses.
Today, the evidence points to the fact that a vast majority of the stimulus funds so far have been used to hire more bureaucrats and grow the number of bureaucrats around the country.