Morning Bell: $787 Billion in Stimulus, Zero Jobs “Created or Saved”
Conn Carroll /
On February 11th, President Barack Obama stood on a windy hilltop in front of a dusty construction site in Fairfax County, Virginia, and promised the American people: “Here in Virginia, my plan will create or save almost 100,000 jobs, doing work at sites just like this one.” Standing alongside current Democratic National Committee Chairman and former-Gov. Tim Kaine, the President continued: “Where we’re standing, that could mean hundreds of construction jobs. And the benefits of jobs we create directly will multiply across the economy.” Eleven months later, none of those promised jobs have been “created or saved.” In fact, the Obama administration quietly announced last week that they were dropping the fraudulent “saved or created” terminology altogether.
The failure of Obama’s $787 billion stimulus is particularly acute in Virginia where, as Heritage fellow Ron Utt has documented, despite $695 million in allocated infrastructure funding, only 16% of designated projects had begun. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar (D-MN) even publicly complained about Virginia’s slow transportation spending, writing to Gov. Kaine: “your state ranks last among all states [51 out of 51, including the District of Columbia], based on an analysis of the percentage of Recovery Act highway formula funds put out to bid, under contract and under way.”
But even where infrastructure spending has been spent, the hard evidence shows that there has not been any positive effect on unemployment. According to an Associated Press analysis reviewed by independent economists at five universities, the $20 billion spent nationwide on infrastructure so far “has had no effect on local unemployment rates.” And this was just the most recent embarrassing headline for the White House’s signature economic policy. Since the first reporting deadline in October, newspapers and other media outlets across the country have identified 94,341 fake jobs reported by the Obama administration as jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus. After the Government Accountability Office issued a report finding “significant reporting and processing problems that need to be addressed,” Obama administration spokesman Ed Pound offered this defense of the Obama administration’s jobs numbers: “Who knows, man, who really knows.”