The "S" Stands For Scam

Democrats in Washington are whispering the dreaded "S" word again.

It was first uttered last month when President Obama urged Congress to approve a $50 billion investment in the nation's aging infrastructure to help stimulate the lethargic economy.  If Republicans didn't learn a lesson with the first stimulus four years ago, then shame on them.

In 2009, President Obama and his Democrat sheep hatched a stimulus scheme that was allegedly designed to rescue the nation from apocalyptic economic disaster.  Many Republicans capitulated and backed the stimulus, fearing they would be blamed if the economic crisis deepened.

However, now there is a preponderance of evidence the $787 billion stimulus was nothing more than a boondoggle.  That explains why the President and the sycophants in his party no longer mention it, even ignoring the law that mandates quarterly public reports.

The president's Council of Economic Advisors is required to issue the reports under Section 1513 of the legislation that created the horribly misnamed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law by Obama on February 17, 2009.

Fourteen quarters have passed since the last last time the council delivered a report in 2011.

In that report, the president's own appointees estimated that it cost $317,000 in stimulus spending to create or save one job.  It marked the fifth consecutive report that inflated the economic cost.  No wonder the council quit issuing reports, particularly in a presidential election year.

The outrageous price tag for a single job wasn't even the most scandalous shortcoming.  Here are just a few facts the servile media has hidden from the public:

• Despite the $787 billion sticker price, the stimulus' actual cost now stands at $831 billion.  Even that figure does not represent the true cost.  The 10-year tab for the stimulus is closer to $2.527 trillion in spending and another $744 billion in costs for interest on the money borrowed to finance the appropriation.  These figures were tabulated by the Congressional Budget Office, which assumed most projects in the stimulus bill would continue to be funded. 
• Obama claimed the stimulus was needed to immediately jump start the economy, yet federal spending trickled out over four years.  A full year after Obama signed the law forty percent of the funds had not been spent.  As of this January 18, the government had allocated $781.48 billion, but in many cases states and cities have held onto the money.  The spending will continue through 2019, a full 10 years after the nation's economic emergency supposedly required an immediate infusion of massive government spending.  
• Obama and Democrats made the case the bloated stimulus primarily supported shovel ready jobs.  In truth, less than 32 percent of the spending was earmarked for loans, grants and contracts that were designed to create or save jobs.  The stimulus contained $290.7 in tax benefits and $241.9 billion in entitlement spending.  The methodologies used to support job creation have been thoroughly discredited because the numbers were based on self-reporting by the beneficiaries of the funding.    

As if these flagrant deficiencies are not enough, the stimulus program has been wracked with fraud, theft and wasteful bungling on a scale that should make the President and Democrats blush with shame.

Numerous reports issued by inspector generals, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and other federal agencies have documented the defects.  The latest is a scathing audit performed by the inspector general for the Department of Energy.

In a January 28 report, the inspector uncovered funds designated for just a handful of smart grid projects involved fraud of $12.3 million. "It's safe to assume there's similar levels of mismanagement throughout the entire $4.5 billion" allocated for smart grid activities, the inspector general wrote.

No longer can anyone credibly claim the stimulus saved anything. Unless you count the job held by President Obama.

Government stimulus of the economy was a bad idea in 2009.  The passage of time offers ample evidence that it is an even worse idea than originally imagined.