The Obamanation

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well? Have you?

[TheMercenary]

This country has a long way to go yet under the umbrella of an Obamanation.

But at least he has beaten Bush on his number of days golfing in the first 9 months! That has to be a record.

http://www.politico.com/click/storie...h_on_golf.html

[TheMercenary]

It's all fun and games, til we kick Reid out of office.

[TheMercenary]

Yes boys and girls, they are bullshitting you...

And we will be checking back in to see about those 3.5million jobs they promised to create...

Stimulus jobs overstated by thousands

Oct 29, 6:35 AM (ET)

By BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE and MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) - An early progress report on President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.

The government's first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

- A company working with the Federal Communications Commission reported that stimulus money paid for 4,231 jobs, when about 1,000 were produced.

- A Georgia community college reported creating 280 jobs with recovery money, but none was created from stimulus spending.

- A Florida child care center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs but used the money on raises for existing employees.

There's no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report. But administration officials seized on the 30,000 figure as evidence that the stimulus program was on its way toward fulfilling the president's promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

The reporting problem could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

The White House says it is aware there are problems. In an interview, Ed DeSeve, an Obama adviser helping to oversee the stimulus program, said agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.

"If there's an error that was made, let's get it fixed," DeSeve said.

The White House released a statement early Thursday that it said laid out the "real facts" about how jobs were counted in the stimulus data distributed two weeks ago. It said that had been a test run of a small subset of data that had been subjected only to three days of reviews, that it had already corrected "virtually all" the mistakes identified by the AP and that the discovery of mistakes "does not provide a statistically significant indication of the quality of the full reporting that will come on Friday."

The data partially reviewed by the AP for errors included all the data presently available, representing all known federal contracts awarded to businesses under the stimulus program. The figures being released Friday include different categories of stimulus spending by state governments, housing authorities, nonprofit groups and other organizations.

As of early Thursday, on its recovery.org Web site, the government was still citing 30,383 as the actual number of jobs linked so far to stimulus spending, despite the mistakes the White House has now acknowledged and said were being corrected.

continues:

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091029/D9BKMVMG0.html

I agree that Obama over-promised on jobs....although the reports are still far from complete, much of the funds have yet to be committed and an 18 month+ time-span as envisioned in the legislation will provide more realistic measures.

But the economy is no longer on the brink as it was in Jan....the 3rd quarter GDP saw the greatest growth in 2 years.....by nearly every measure, the worst of the recession is behind us, with the exception of jobs...always the last indicator to recover.

We have no idea what would have happened w/o the stimulus program, the TARP program, etc.

IMO, it would have been bad public policy to take that risk and I certainly did not see any better alternative, including doing nothing.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

We have no idea what would have happened w/o the stimulus program, the TARP program, etc.

IMO, it would have been bad public policy to take that risk and I certainly did not see any better alternative, including doing nothing.

I am not in complete disagreement. What needs to asked is did we get what we paid for and has this opened a period of unbridled spending by the party in power to "fix" things that are broken?

[TheMercenary]

Well if I owned a business, and I fired a bunch of people and my bottom line improved, my numbers would reflect that. Still there were 500,000 new jobless claims last month. Tell those 500,000 people who just lost more jobs the economy is improving. One months growth is no measure of the overall health of the economy. It is smoke and mirrors by the Obama Administration that things are on the mend. Nothing more, nothing less. And given the minor investigation by the AP into their numbers, they have a lot to explain.

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Well if I owned a business, and I fired a bunch of people and my bottom line improved, my numbers would reflect that. Still there were 500,000 new jobless claims last month. Tell those 500,000 people who just lost more jobs the economy is improving. One months growth is no measure of the overall health of the economy. It is smoke and mirrors by the Obama Administration that things are on the mend. Nothing more, nothing less. And given the minor investigation by the AP into their numbers, they have a lot to explain.

Unemployment claims are at a 9 month low. Every economic indicator shows improvement since January with most improvements coming after the stimulus was enacted... except jobs...always the last to turn around.

So what would you have done differently in terms of public policy?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

Unemployment claims are at a 9 month low.

So what would you have done differently in terms of public policy?

I would have considered letting more of the businesses fail. Take a look at GMAC, they are back at the trough asking for more.

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

I would have considered letting more of the businesses fail. Take a look at GMAC, they are back at the trough asking for more.

Creating a ripple down effect of even more unemployment from all the affected ancillary industries?

And yet, that was not the biggest piece of the stimulus program.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

Creating a ripple down effect of even more unemployment from all the affected ancillary industries?

And yet, that was not the biggest piece of the stimulus program.

Well that is the point. We had the unemployment anyway. Who's to say it might not have been more profound up front but then end up with a healthier system in the long run. Instead we have created a welfare system for big corps. Now the "to big to fail" continues to feed the monster combined with more government involvement in how business is being conducted in private industry.

[classicman]

I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.
- Edward Gibbon

Wish I had listened to this one a loooooong time ago.

"There are a lot of lies going around.... and half of them are true."
- Winston Churchill

[classicman]

WASHINGTON – Many communities hit hardest by job losses, those built around dying factories and mills, have been slowest to see relief from President Obama's stimulus plan.

The manufacturing industry has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs during the recession as plants have closed or scaled back. Places such as the southwest Missouri city of Lamar, tucked amid endless fields of winter wheat and soybeans, have seen the cornerstones of their economies disappear, leaving a gap that even billions in roadwork and government aid cannot fill.

Lamar began feeling the recession ahead of the rest of the country, when the furniture-maker O'Sullivan Industries closed its doors in mid-2007, immediately leaving 700 workers unemployed and turning its factory into a million-square-foot vacancy.

That began what city manager Lynn Calton calls "a slow death." Stores folded. A 50-year-old car dealership went under. One in 10 jobs disappeared last year. Everyone suffered, from the downtown florist to the dentist who cleaned the factory workers' teeth.

Even Mayor Keith Divine filed for unemployment when his furniture store went out of business. He now sells carpet and mattresses and says he hasn't seen evidence of the 640,000 jobs saved or created nationwide thanks to the $787 billion stimulus.

For the Obama administration, Lamar is as much a problem of expectations as it is of policy. For all the items contained in the stimulus, from tax cuts to road work to new schools, nothing could quickly replace what factory towns like Lamar had lost.

That's why the White House says it's unfair to judge the stimulus by the unemployment rate because no amount of stimulus was going to keep Lamar's unemployment rate from approaching 12 percent.

Nationwide, only 2,500 of the 640,000 stimulus jobs announced Friday were in the manufacturing industry, and many of those appear to be mislabeled. Teachers were the biggest winners because states used federal aid to fill budget gaps, then credited the money with avoiding layoffs —even if no such layoffs were planned.

"We haven't seen any improvements in our town," said Gary Macklem, the mayor of Croswell, Mich., a small city in a county built on farming and factories, where unemployment has hovered just below 20 percent all year. "We lost two factories and the other factories are hanging by a shoe string."

Link

There is no way that paint & rumblestrips can help these places. A far more comprehensive plan was needed to stimulate these industries.

Originally Posted by classicman

....There is no way that paint & rumblestrips can help these places. A far more comprehensive plan was needed to stimulate these industries.

I dont think it was ever the intent of the stimulus program to save dying factories that cant compete in the global economy...but to stimulate the replacing of those jobs and retooling of those industries with jobs in new technologies and growth industries...but that takes more than 6 months.

The short-term "shovel ready" paint and rumble strip jobs, as well as the public sector jobs (police, teachers, etc) that may have been saved accomplished much of what was expected...to keep people employed and to keep money flowing in the economy.

Teachers or painters or rumble strip layers who are employed are likely to spend money that they would not spend if unemployed.....which helped keep other people employed and helped keep the economy from tanking completely. Many (most?) economists have said that the stimulus program (and the TARP) contributed to ending the recession. How much it contributed is subject to differences of opinion.

More than half of the stimulus "jobs" funds is to start the process of restructuring the economy with jobs in alternative energy, technology (eg building a broadband infrastructure) and other emerging or growth industries. And most of these funds are still in the process of being awarded. That is why it was envisioned as a 18-24 month economic stimulus program.

IMO, that is comprehensive....a mix of quick fixes and longer-term (but still with a sense of urgency) economic restructuring.

How else would you have made it more comprehensive?

added:
For the record, I dont think it was a great plan.

I do think it was a necessary plan and didnt hear any better options.

[classicman]

I personally don't have a better plan. That's one reason why I'm not an elected official. I hear about these police and teachers that were kept on through the implementation of the stimulus money, but now thats gone and the states are going to have to come up with more revenue to maintain their employ. Where is that money coming from. Did this just "stop the bleeding' for awhile?