Nearly three months after the Democratic Congress passed Obama’s stimulus bill, early results are already pointing to the bill being a spectacular failure. Today, the Washington Post revealed that despite $135 billion from the stimulus bill being provided to state governments to limit layoffs, “many states are finding that the funds are not enough and are moving to lay off thousands of public employees.” From the article:
The layoffs are one early indication of how the stimulus funding could be coming up short against the economic downturn. As the stimulus plan was being drawn up, there was agreement among the White House, congressional Democrats and many economists that a key goal was to keep states from making big layoffs at a time when 700,000 Americans were losing their jobs every month.
Of course, the article concludes it must be because the stimulus bill wasn’t large enough. The
article continues:
Western Washington University in Bellingham is bracing for 400 layoffs of staff members and adjunct faculty. The college is the largest employer in its county.
"There was all the talk at the time about how the stimulus package wasn't big enough, and that is true here," said faculty union president Bill Lyne. "It's barely letting us keep our noses above water."
This is insanity. You cannot cure fiscal irresponsibility by prescribing more fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, using Obama’s own projections, it appears the stimulus bill is already failing in its primary mission: saving and creating jobs. When President Obama first proposed the stimulus bill, he used this graph to illustrate the jobs that would be saved by his stimulus plan:
As you can see, however, these projections have not held up. The truth more closely reflects this graph:
In other words, unemployment under Obama’s stimulus plan has already spiked higher than Obama’s own unemployment predictions for what would have happened if there had never been a stimulus bill. Now, it’s hard to predict these things, and I’m not faulting Obama and his economic team too much for just being wrong in their predictions. However, when you bet $787 billion on your predictions, money you don’t even have, you better make sure your predictions are right. In this case, they not only seem to be wrong but, according to Obama’s own projections, it appears the stimulus plan has been ineffective and possibly made things quite a bit worse. Meanwhile, our country continues to spiral downward in uncontrollable debt.
