Your letter specifically asks if I am able to certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable. No, I am not able to make this certification
—Earl Devaney, Chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (responding to questions posed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.) November 19, 2009.
ATLANTA— At what point do the charades stop? Earl Devany, Barack Obama’s chairman of “Recovery Accountability,” is unable to certify the accuracy of the stimulus jobs created/saved numbers recently published on Recovery.org. ABC News has reported the Administration has already slashed 60,000 from its first estimate of jobs created/saved, in response to mounting criticism about the sloppy, uncertifiable accounting for those jobs.
What a total fraud. Fear-mongering was used to sell the stimulus back in February, and now fraudulent job numbers are used to try and placate the public in November.
But this raises the larger question, which was dismissed by leftists during the stimulus debate last February. Did we truly believe that the stimulus package would create or save jobs, without destroying others through the ripple effect of unintended consequences?
The chart we have been tracking above may suggest the latter- that the stimulus may well be taking away employment opportunities in industries not blessed with being “stimulated” by fiscal policy. After all, the Administration projected a peak unemployment rate of around 9 percent when selling the bill in February, if stimulus was not passed. Stimulus was passed and now unemployment is over 10%. While this more likely highlights the inherent trickiness of projecting unemployment rates, it nonetheless should be a big enough gap between reality and projections to give us all pause.
Does the chart above suggest we would have been better-off without stimulus?
This is a very relevant point, because in early February, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the stimulus package would “stimulate” near-term economic growth, at the expense of long-term economic growth. I don’t know about you, but that trade-off looks worse now, given that the stimulus is doing basically nothing to help near-term unemployment. It should be enough to make you pretty angry!
And what makes it worse is that Christina Romer, one of Barack Obama’s top economic advisors, stated in October that we have already felt the greatest impact of the stimulus package. As pitiful as that impact has been, the economy will likely not benefit much from it going forward, she admits.
Really!? With joblessness off the charts? With Recovery.org lying to us about the number of jobs created/saved, and with even that fraudulent number being a drop in the bucket relative to total jobs lost throughout this process?
Really!?
Louis Woodhill, of the Club for Growth, makes the following, salient observation: “The ‘household survey data’ showed that 589,000 jobs vanished during October. This is bad enough, but the three-month moving average of changes in total employment (current month and prior two months) shows that job losses are actually accelerating.” Mr. Woodhill goes on to credit this phenomenon to the inability of small businesses to find capital to expand, given that the government is sucking so much capital out of the markets through its treasury sales to finance fiscal “stimulus.” And Mr. Woodhill doesn’t even go into the paralysis Democrats are creating by threatening vast, sweeping changes in regulations and taxes over the energy, financial, and health-care industries.
We are being plagued by the unintended, negative consequences of too much government involvement in our economy.
My solution?
Push the government back to the side-lines and give us a stable currency. Then watch what a free people can achieve economically!
TennesseePaul
Stephen VanNuys
Brooklyn Daniel
The Freedom Thinker
Since Obama has taken office, the economy has lost over 4 million jobs and by some estimates the “real unemployment figure” is 17% and still rising.
Any benefit from the “stimulus” bill has been limited to the financial and government sectors of the economy with the average guy on the street getting shafted, as usual. Not only that, I saw an article in the local newspaper recently warning that for a number of people (mainly retirees), the highly-touted $250 payment this year for so many citizens may have an adverse impact on their future tax returns – in effect calling for the return of the money.
Nothing but never-ending lies and deception from this administration, whose members continue to gorge themselves on taxpayer funds with no end in sight for their increasing demands for more spending.
Funny you bring up that article, Maine. We were talking to my uncle in Oklahoma a while back, and he said the same thing. His friends are all going to get taxed on it. And in his case, he had to give it back due to some complicating factors. What a sham that was. And to think the very FRD-esque purpose was to buy the blessings of senior citizens for this crappy healthcare package in front of Congress.
They had errors near 10%. Who excepts a margin of error rate of 10% with data that can be tested and analyzed. 60,000 of 600,000. What a joke.
You hit the nail on the head when you write
As an accountant I think of current and long-term, as short and long-term. A current asset/liability is something maturing in the next 12 months. If this is the case with a budget office (i.e. accountants) and they say short-term benefit we are getting to the extent of the short-term benefit as Obama’s pretend stimulus bill (i.e. read pork barrel spending bill) is closing in on it’s one year mark early in 2010. He’s all but warned of this fact already saying things like “danger of a double dip”.
Of course there’s a danger of a double-dip. They never let the first dip play itself out fully. They kicked the can down the road and elongated this thing meaninglessly.
“He’s all but warned of this fact already saying things like ‘danger of a double dip’.”
This was nothing but political posturing. Now, he can say that he predicted it – what a egomaniac!!!
An error this high on a public company’s financial statements and it gets revealed? CFO goes to hang, even if not fraudulent – Controller likely gets the boot too. CEO would have to step down too probably.
Yet, here our government promises transparency, can’t deliver on that promise, and we are left just with downward revisions. If, you can’t give an accurate report then it likely discredits all of the data.
Amen to that, I made income and expense projections out five years. If I MISS by 1.5% it is the difference between profitability and loss. If I miss by 3% we utilize all our reserve funds. If I miss by 3%+ we have trouble making payroll and I’ll should be hung for stupidity.
They miss by 10% and what happens? We get an oops. The whole Recovery.org thing is a load of bull to begin with so it doesn’t really matter. Except it’s just funny to see the blatant disregard for how the world actually operates displayed. It’s like they live in a cartoon world where financial experts can be off by 10% and still get raises. A world where for filling out a form saying I might create or retain some jobs without any type of documentation or analysis is reported as jobs actually created and for which the organization gets the rights to millions in taxpayers money. A world in which being transparent is putting up a map with a bunch of self-reported numbers. It’s like an independent audit being performed by the CFO of the company by copying and pasting an unreconciled bank balance saying see we saved a million dollars this year I give myself an unqualified opinion no internal control issues here.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1130713/000110465909065309/a09-31176_5ex99d1.htm
Check that out Freedom Thinker!
BMM: That is definitely circulating around the audit world, let me tell you.
Withering, to say the least!
Good stuff. I don’t know much about overstock but I’m sure $700,000 is not a gigantic portion of their budget. Good comparison of the real world versus the governments cartoon world.
>If, you can’t give an accurate report then it likely discredits all of the data.
I agree. What was the point of this? While I disagree with a lot of his economic counselors, I actually have respect for them, including Summers and Romer, based on things I’ve read from them and read about them. They aren’t radical leftists, themselves. Probably center to slightly left of center, which is not great, but not all bad. All that to say, I have judged them to be among the more reasonable, non-ideological people in the Administration. I just wonder how they could get behind this? They have to know this is a sham.
I really do think politicians and people in Washington think we are all idiots.
Mindless masses.
BTW – I just read through Internet explorer…. Still will not save my comment subscription preference.
I disabled tracking cookies… would that be a reason potentially?
Probably. Tracking cookies are delicious
It doesn’t like you any more, BMM. But we do. So please try to remember to come back by, even if not prompted to by your computer.
Stephen,
Sorry, I am a bit late to the game on this post, but this is excellent work. You are right, neither Summers nor Romer are radical leftists, but, it may not be any specific ideology that motivates them.
If the Obama administration had wanted to stimulate job growth, why not just give a tax credit to small businesses for each new person they hired during the tax year. That would truly have been stimulus. The cynical side of me believes that this is all about, power, payback, control, and ego. I have worked in DC long enough to see this even in the lower levels of government service. I can only imagine how strong a pull it is at the top levels. This has never been about jobs. That is why the administration is making a cottage industry around spinning the truth. I bet it pays well.
Chuck – that is cynical, but you are probably right in many ways. If your perspective is corect, then my guess would be they thought by elongating chaos and dependency, it give them the political cover to enact more and more pieces of legislation that consolidate power in Washington, much like FDR was able to do during the Great Depression. They guessed wrong, though. Bet no one in the administration thought Obama’s job approval would be below 50 percent 1 year after the election. I think they really thought the opposition would melt away and be viewed by and large as a crazy, fringe of Bush-lovers, very much outside the main stream. They were wrong. Just hope we are able to stop them before they ruin health care.
At least the spending under the stimulus will end some day. Once they set in motion “health care reform,” there’s basically no way to stop it. It is too comprehensive and you would basically be arguing to take people’s insurance away, a losing situation that Democrats know full well…
This, more than anything else — and I include death panels, unconstitutional mandates, rationing, and everything else — scares people the most about health reform. No one believes the numbers, and they know that if those numbers go bad (as if they are already good!) they go VERY bad. We’re tying ourselves to a fiscal anchor and throwing it overboard, with the skipper telling us, “Don’t worry, you’re just taking a little swim.”
One of the threats in Taiwan is an internal coup. Many think that instead of an all out invasion from the Chinese mainland, the Communists will just plant their own candidate in the Taiwanese government, gain populist support through a bunch of false promises, and then invite the Chinese back in once his administration was in place. Taiwan could conceivably fall to China without a shot ever being fired. The perfect political coup d’etat.
It seems ironic that the Taiwanese government could actually use the Obama Administration’s assault on American liberty and commerce to prepare for this contingency.
>It seems ironic that the Taiwanese government could actually use the Obama Administration’s assault on American liberty and commerce to prepare for this contingency.
Interesting perspective, Chuck. Had not heard that possiblity.
I wasn’t 100% sure if I followed the connection you were making above. I’d be curious to hear you flesh that out.
Agreed, Marque. I think most people instinctively don’t believe these reform bills “pay for themselves.” The bills rely too much on Medicare cuts, which are political suicide. I’ll bet even if this bill passes, those are repealed or curtailed long before they ever have any effect. And our deficits will balloon ridiculously out of whack.
At some point, this borrowing is going to really sting us. Interest rates are really low now, but the US government basically rolls over its debt every 4 to 5 years. That process is going to start getting ugly once we have one more full year of a trillion dollar deficit.
Amen to that Marque. Just look at Medicare we were told that would only cost $3 billion a couple decades later the number is closing in on $300 billion. Now we’re being sold a $1 trillion dollar bill what happens when it comes back as a $100 trillion. A swim indeed.