Stim bill failure - by the numbers

By Rick Moran

John Hinderaker at Powerline points us to a very dense, scholarly study of the impact on jobs of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Nearly a trillion dollars was poured into the economy but with what effect?

Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor, the authors of the study, give their conclusions:

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.

Hinderaker adds:

So the American people borrowed and spent close to a trillion dollars to destroy a net of more than one-half million jobs. Does President Obama understand this? I very much doubt it. When he expressed puzzlement at the idea that the stimulus money may not have been well-spent, and said that "spending equals stimulus," he betrayed a shocking level of economic ignorance.

There is something truly pathetic in the childlike ignorance of Barack Obama and the liberals. Their answer to the failed stimulus bill was to urge another, much larger amount to really get things going. I might add that the failure of the stim bill is also indicative of Obama's failure as a leader, as he contracted out the writing and passage of the bill to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Those two partisans quickly turned the near trillion dollar measure into a rewards program for Obama's supporters in the unions.

Obama doesn't talk much about the stim bill on the hustings except to say that the bill saved the world from a bad depression. That kind of nonsense will be believed until studies like the one above become general knowledge.