.............................."Jared Bernstein, economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden - the White House's point man on the stimulus - said in a cable-news interview in February 2009: "I think what people need to understand is that this really isn't rocket science." Spend a bundle on public works projects and - boom - you get a lot of people working.
They were wrong.
They were wrong not just about the effect of infrastructure spending - even an analysis by the Associated Press found no evidence unemployment was significantly improved by the Recovery Act's public-works projects - but they were wrong about the existence of shovel-ready jobs in the first place. (They were also misleading, since only a tiny, tiny fraction of the stimulus went to any infrastructure at all. The bulk went to social programs.)
Back in October, when Obama admitted that he had to learn on the job that shovel-ready jobs don't exist, then-governor Ed Rendell (D., Penn.) - a leader in the push for the stimulus - told the New York Times it was all a terrible misunderstanding. "When we said ‘shovel ready' we meant ‘shovel ready' in the way we do things." He added, "I don't think we meant to be deceptive."
You've got to love the "I don't think" there.
The "way we do things" involves endless paperwork, union regulations, environmental red tape, and the like. That's why it only took 410 days to build the Empire State building and 16 months to build the Pentagon but nearly 20 years to complete Boston's Big Dig. Lord knows how long it will be for the government to finish work on Ground Zero.
The point is that the president and his team came into office insisting that they were on top of things and above mere ideological considerations. When confronted with skepticism about the existence of "shovel-ready" projects, they in effect rolled their eyes and scoffed at the backseat drivers.
But they were the ones who were blinded by ideology. One need not be an ideologue to understand that public-works contracting has become bloated and inefficient. Indeed, one must be an ideologue of a certain kind not to understand that. Or one has to be incredibly naive. Or both.
While I'm sure the stimulus added or saved some jobs, does anyone really think it accomplished much based on how much it cost? And I'm seeing some liberals saying the stiumlus just wasn't big enough. We need another one!
Then again, about 1/3rd of the stimulus were tax cuts. So if you believe the stimulus was worthless, then the tax cuts didn't work either. It would be nice if there were a way to seperate it out.
Another thing I'd like to see, and it probably exists somewhere, is a company-by-company breakdown of those companies that got stimulus money, and just how many jobs they added. The article made an interesting point about the LED lighting company that got $5.2 million and added three jobs.
There was also a link at that site to a pretty funny video which covers a bit of this...
