While the Democrat-approved $787 billion “stimulus” has bloated government payrolls, independent analyses show it has not created promised private-sector jobs.
So the administration dropped its old formula for counting jobs supposedly “created or saved” by the stimulus and came up with a new accounting method. President Barack Obama says the administration now gets to count even stimulus-funded jobs that were never in danger of being lost without the money. The administration also says it is entitled to count stimulus-funded pay raises as “jobs.”
Plus, as reported by The Associated Press, “The new rules allow stimulus recipients to limit the job tally to quarterly reports, making it impossible to avoid double-counting a job that was created in one quarter and continued into the next.”
All these gimmicks are guaranteed to inflate the jobs count.
But alas, this isn’t the first time the rules have changed in the middle of the game. First, the stimulus was about “creating” jobs — 90 percent of which were supposed to be in the private sector. Then it was about “creating or saving” jobs, and the president downplayed the fact that most of the stimulus jobs were in government. Now, with unemployment still in double digits and companies still laying off workers, the administration wants to claim credit for any job that gets any stimulus money, even if the job wasn’t in jeopardy in the first place.
And this whole counterproductive spectacle is being paid for with borrowed money, adding to our $12.1 trillion national debt, on which we will be paying crippling amounts of interest for generations.
Rather than push for a second “stimulus,” shouldn’t the administration and Democrats in Congress acknowledge that the first one failed, pull back any of the money that has not been spent and end talk of a second “stimulus”?