In September 2009, Paul Krugman wrote, "And the purpose of stimulus is, first and foremost, to mitigate unemployment." So with Krugman's statement providing background, let's see what is currently going on (or not going on) with the stimulus.

Did you know that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 (better known as the stimulus) has in it a requirement for quarterly impact reporting? Section 1513 (see page 174) of the ARRA requires:

In consultation with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget [OMB] and the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers [CEA] shall submit quarterly reports to the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and House of Representatives that detail the impact of programs funded through covered funds on employment, estimated economic growth, and other key economic indicators."

For some reason the President Barack Hussein "kill list" Obama administration stopped issuing the required reports to the CEA head Alan Krueger after the second quarter of 2011. Obama's administration is currently four quarters behind. It seems that the administration is very lax about holding itself to the same standards that it wants to impose on everyone else. Can I ask the FBI to ignore the law, as Obama has done, if I rob a bank? I don't think that will work, even though no person is supposed to be above the law.

Why, one asks, did Obama and his administration, cease issuing stimulus impact reports? Could the answer be that taxpayers could easily see what a waste of money the stimulus has been? The CEA, in January 2010, said that by using "mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus" (which it said was a "natural way to estimate the effects of" the stimulus), it could estimate the effect of the stimulus. In other words, Obama's own economists were reporting total stimulus costs, as well as the number of jobs saved or created. Let's examine the stimulus performance on a cost per job basis.   

The December 2011 report includes stimulus' impact through the second quarter of 2011. The trend is that the cost per job is increasing. But since there has been no report since the second quarter of 2011, what is the present cost per job? Let's see. The last stimulus performance report, required quarterly by law, was issued in December 2011. And that report covered the second quarter of 2011. It is now October 2012 (third quarter of the year). That means that if Obama wants to adhere to a law written into his own stimulus bill, he had better hurry. But I'm not holding my breath for a current report.

The primary question I have is, "Where is the MSM on this?" Can any AT reader help me? And let's not forget that the stimulus was second in importance to another disaster: ObamaCare. So,how can the MSM not know what's going on? Or perhaps the MSM, since it's in-the-tank for Obama, simply chooses to ignore Obama's lawlessness in order to try to get him re-elected.

This from the Most Transparent Administration in History. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure! And all it cost us taxpayers is $831 billion of money we don't have.

But that's just my opinion.

Dr. Beatty earned a Ph.D. in quantitative management and statistics from Florida State University. He was a (very conservative) professor of quantitative management specializing in using statistics to assist/support decision-making. He has been a consultant to many small businesses and is now retired. Dr. Beatty is a veteran who served in the U.S. Army for 22 years. He blogs at rwno.limewebs.com.