Happy birthday, stimulus…

The stimulus package His oneness promised would fix everything is three years old today.   Matt Negrin hits  the rewind button on  what some said at the time,  though stimulus is a word the White House no longer has in its dictionary, perhaps because it so clearly did not work,  as pointed  out here.

More stimulus waste…

The I.R.S. and its watchdog  are at loggerheads  over  billions awarded as tax credits for college expenses.   As the Tax Policy Institute put it,
The IRS doesn’t know who a student is.”

Was it stimulating?

Did the stimulus create jobs?   Could  it still be  doing so?   Or did it and other bad economic policies just  make our economy  worse?   House Democrats are pushing  for more of  the same.

Jonah Goldberg  doesn’t think   His Oneness can pull it off with his speech this Thursday.   Bill McGurn goes further to say the President has a  speech impediment.

Amtrak’s Biden station…

The Veep is a big supporter of Amtrak,  which just happened to name the station old Joe uses after him — not that the loser company was trying to curry favor after he got it a big chunk of stimulus money.  The CEO’s train died  on the way to the naming ceremony, and he was forced to use alternative means of transportation,  known to us unwashed masses as a car.

The Biden station  upgrade project got $20 million in stimulus funding,  but came in $5.7 million over the initial announced budget.  Gee,  who could have guessed?

Stimulus doesn’t work…

Stimulus spending  by the government doesn’t work.  You don’t have to be an economics professor to  understand de Rugy’s post,  or the column she links to.

Romer’s lament…

The departing adviser of His Oneness  wishes she hadn’t used the 8% unemployment figure in her January report.   I’m with Joseph Lawler on this one.

Confirmation of the failure of the economic policies is  here.

Opacity plus…

The stimulus website  doesn’t meet its own requirements for transparency.

Stimulus bombed for business…

As anyone with a brain and no government job knows,  the stimulus was a giant bust,  as detailed  here .

This  is one example of why –$4,000 solar trashcans.   Or an $18,000 sign.

As for actual jobs,  Veronique de Rugy posts her  unemployment chart,   in all its brutal clarity.

Jobs for some…

I couldn’t resist this  graph of the day about jobs.    Government workers have been added,  while the private sector has been ravaged.  We need even more government employees to mismanage all the money we’re borrowing from China,  and we’ll need still more to take money and profits away from those who still possess them,  except of course,  labor unions,  federal workers,  and the progressive special interest groups and buddies on Wall Street which elected His Oneness.

The stimulus was a payoff to them,  and the second will be a payment to keep them in the fold while Obama wrecks the country he has the least affection for.

What free market?

If you want a head start on matters economic in the face of the Democrats’ furious push to have the government control everything,  you can do no better than to read this post by Veronique de Rugy — and be sure to click on the links too.

And since the Obama Administration has been caught lying through its pearly whites about jobs created/saved,  read her additional post on the non-stimulating stimulus and how poorly it was done.

With regard to unemployment,  she links to an interesting New York Times piece which you should check out.   The post also has  another link showing what the actual unemployment rate is  — it’s 17.5%.    There is also a  valid argument that the true rate is over 20%.