The most transparent administration in the history of our country.
You know when someone says that, they mean exactly the opposite.
From Jeffrey H. Anderson writing at
The Weekly Standard:
Ahead of Election, Obama Stops Releasing �Stimulus� Reports
The $831,000,000,000 economic �stimulus� that President Obama spearheaded and signed into law requires his administration to release quarterly reports on its effects. But �the most transparent administration in the history of our country� is now four reports behind schedule and has so far not released any reports whatsoever in 2012. Its most recent quarterly report is for the quarter than ended on June 30, 2011.
One wonders how the administration would treat a private citizen who acted like such a scofflaw in response to one of Obama�s principal legislative initiatives. It certainly appears that this administration, which is so very fond of regulating Americans� lives � witness the 13,000 pages of Obamacare regulations it has already penned � doesn�t hold itself accountable to the same set of rules that it�s so eager to compel the American people to obey.
Section 1513 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the �stimulus�) explicitly states, �In consultation with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers 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.� (The head of the Council of Economic Advisors, currently Alan Krueger, is appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and works within the Executive Office of the President. He is the president�s chief economic adviser.)
There may be a reason -- the "jobs created" numbers:
In January 2010, Obama�s Council of Economic Advisors reported that, using �mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus� (which it described as a �natural way to estimate the effects of� the legislation), the �stimulus� had at that point cost $263.3 billion and had added or saved about 1.8 million jobs, whether private or public. In other words, for every $148,000 in taxpayer money that had gone out the door, only one job had been added or saved � according to an estimate from Obama�s own economists.
It gets worse:
By the April 2010 report, according to that same method of estimating the stimulus�s effects, the tally was up to $167,000 spent for each job added or saved. By the July 2010 report, the tally was up to $190,000. By November 2010, it was up to $206,000. By March 2011, it was up to $242,000. By July 2011, it was up to $278,000 (at which point the White House objected to my highlighting its own numbers, and I responded). And by the December 2011 report (which covered the stimulus�s effects through the second quarter of 2011), it was up to $317,000 � $317,000 of taxpayers� money that was borrowed and spent for each job that was added or saved.
No budget from the Senate, no reporting. I really do not blame them as the numbers just plain suck -- their great plan didn't work just as it is failing in Europe and as it has failed everywhere it was tried.
Marx was a moron, a failed businessman and one of the original trust-fund babies. His ideas sound good to a cloistered academic with zero real-world experience but try them out on real people and real world situations and they will fail. Always. Spectacularly. People will die and the society will become divided into two classes with the poor being held down by the wealthy.
Posted by DaveH at October 19, 2012 6:14 PM