John Kerry wants to spend $4 billion to stimulate the economy...of Palestinians...

Lurch is playing fast and loose with our money...

Via Guardian:

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner “Breaking the Impasse”, Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be “bigger, bolder and more ambitious” than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

The Palestinian Authority isn't interested unless it comes with Israel's head on a pole...

Via Times of Israel:

The Palestinian Authority on Monday rejected the idea of economic benefits in exchange for political concessions put forward by US Secretary of State John Kerry one day prior.
“The Palestinian leadership will not offer political concessions in exchange for economic benefits,” PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s economic adviser, Mohammad Mustafa, said in a statement, according to the Palestinian Ma’an news agency. “We will not accept that the economy is the primary and sole component.”

The statement came a day after US Secretary of State John Kerry announced a $4 billion investment plan meant to jumpstart both the Palestinian economy and peace talks with Israel.

Chart of the Day: Stimulus Jobs Gap

The Stimulus as supposed to reduce unemployment to 5.6% today.

Via American Enterprise Institute:

Stimulus Fail: Administration allocated $10 million to the ATF’s“Project Gunrunner”

Instead of jobs created or saved, Obama should tout people killed or maimed.

(CNS News) – President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus act allocated $10 million to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for a program that traced guns sold to straw purchasers, an operation that was designed to prevent Mexican criminal organizations from obtaining U.S. guns.

The $787-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the stimulus, was passed by Congress and signed into law in February 2009. From this near-trillion dollar trove, the administration allocated $10 million to the ATF’s“Project Gunrunner” to increase staff by 37 persons, according to a November 2010 Department of Justice Inspector General report.
The phased-in hiring of stimulus-funded staff was almost complete by September 2010, according to the IG report.

Project Gunrunner had begun in 2006 to trace U.S. guns being sold to Mexican criminals. As the program evolved, in some cases the tracing of guns included allowing the sale of guns through straw purchases.

The controversial Operation of Fast and Furious, which allowed nearly 2,000 guns to flow into Mexico, was the Phoenix, Ariz. component of Project Gunrunner, a national program.

Keep on reading…

Green Stimulus Dollars Creating Jobs...For Koreans

Unions may be unhappy with Obama, but they will march lockstep the polls this year and vote for four more years of failure.

(CBS News) Michigan once had the worst unemployment rate in the U.S. So when stimulus tax dollars poured into the state's electric car industry, residents had reason to celebrate. But what happened next has angered some of President Obama's most ardent supporters.

In 2010, Obama and Vice President Biden personally appeared to break ground at two Michigan plants. The plants were getting a combined $300 million under the stimulus program to build electric car batteries.


But as it turns out the companies getting all those American tax dollars are largely owned by Koreans. They bought a lot of Korean equipment and supplies. And they filled some of those sought-after jobs with Korean workers. That drew anger from local labor unions. They say pictures, taken inside the plants show Korean nationals doing hands-on work that should be done by Americans.

"I think there's a lot of anger out there, not to be confused with any sort of prejudice against anyone from another country," said Mark Mangione, who represents 1,000 labor union members in west Michigan. "This is American taxpayer dollars and there should be American jobs that are created with those American taxpayer dollars."

How many stimulus dollars does it take to clothe two job seekers in Detroit?

Apparently, the amount is $11 million. Are you angry yet?

DETROIT (WWJ/AP) – An audit has found that a portion of an $11 million federal grant intended to provide business attire to 400 low-income job-seekers in Detroit helped only two people.

The audit of the city’s Department of Human Services found the department failed to control the operations and finances of a boutique that was to provide clothes, the Detroit News reported. The city’s auditor general conducted the review for the period from July 2009 to September 2011.

The center, at 1970 Larned, included the Customer Choice Pantry, the New Beginnings Clothing Boutique and a call center that had the capacity to service 60,000 families in need. The boutique was to provide business attire for low-income residents for job interviews.

To receive clothing, residents were required to have a job interview scheduled. According to the audit, the DHS was supposed to help 400 people between October 2010 and September 2011 but instead served only two.

Report: Obama's new budget proposal will include $500 billion in new spending and $1.5 Trillion in new taxes

President Obama still believes the U.S.A. can spend and tax it's way to greatness.

(Washington Post) — President Obama will send Congress a 2013 spending plan that would raise taxes on the rich and pump nearly $500 billion into new transportation projects over the next decade, launching an election-year debate over the budget that promises starkly different visions for managing government debt and the sluggish economy.

As they prepare to face voters in November, neither the president nor congressional Republicans are expected to roll out many new or potentially painful prescriptions for slowing the rise of the $15 trillion national debt. After failing repeatedly last year to forge a bipartisan consensus, few in either party see much point in trying again now.
Instead, Obama will on Monday reprise recommendations he unveiled last fall that seek to reduce borrowing by more than $3 trillion over the next decade while spending more in the short term to bring down persistently high unemployment.

The president’s blueprint calls for reductions in spending on federal health programs and the military, a small raise for federal workers and more than $1.5 trillion in new taxes on corporations, hedge-fund managers and the wealthy, in part through the expiration of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts on annual incomes of more than $250,000.

Yet another Obama funded green energy company files bankruptcy

This time it is Indiana-based energy-storage company Ener1. They go a $118.5 million stimulus grant for their subsidiary EnerDel. It's almost as if President Obama was a community organizer and had no business experience. Oh!

Via The Hill:

An Indiana-based energy-storage company, whose subsidiary received a $118.5 million stimulus grant from the Energy Department, filed for bankruptcy Thursday.

Ener1 is asking a federal bankruptcy court in New York to approve a plan to restructure the company’s debt and infuse $81 million in equity funding.

“This was a difficult, but necessary, decision for our company,” Ener1 CEO Alex Sorokin said in a news release. “We are extremely pleased to have the strong support of our primary investors and lenders to substantially reduce the company’s debt.”

The company said it hopes the plan will “support continued operation of Ener1’s subsidiaries and help ensure that the restructuring will not adversely impact their employees, customers and suppliers.”

The Energy Department in 2009 approved a $118.5 million stimulus grant for EnerDel, a subsidiary of the company that develops lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles. The company has so far spent $55 million of the federal funding.

CBO: Stimulus cost more than advertized and created few jobs

The CBO now admits the Stimulus created as few as 700,000 jobs and will hurt the economy in the long run. Unfortunately, the money is already spent and our grandchildren will have to pay the bill.

(IBD) — After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it cost more than advertised, did less to boost growth and will hurt the economy in the long run.

In its latest quarterly report on the economic effects of the Obama stimulus, the CBO sharply lowered its “worst case” scenario while trimming many of its upper-bound estimates for stimulus-fueled growth and employment.

The new report finds, for example, that the stimulus may have added as little as 0.7% to GDP growth in 2010 — when spending was at its peak — and created as few as 700,000 new jobs.
Both are down significantly from the CBO’s previous worst-case scenario.

Keep on reading…

Flashback: Sen. Sherrod Brown Claimed Cincinnati bridge Obama visited was "shovel ready" project for Stimulus I

Oh the deceptions Democrats love to weave...

Sen. Sherrod Brown Jan 2009: "We do need to do direct spending on job creation. That means shovel-ready projects for water and sewer systems, whether it's the Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati, that will put a lot of people to work and help with economic development."

Actually, the Brent Spence Bridge won't likely be "shovel ready" if Stimulus II passes due to environmental red tape.

Payback: Recipient of $107 Million Federal Tax Credit For Wind Power Project Holds Obama Fundraiser

If this happened in business, the person involved would be fired for conflict of interest if not outright fraud.

(Politico) — President Barack Obama will raise money in early October with a Missouri businessman whose company benefited from a $107 million federal tax credit to develop a wind power facility in his state.

Tom Carnahan, a scion of Missouri’s most prominent Democratic political family, is listed on Obama’s campaign website as a host of a $25,000-per-person fundraiser to be held in St. Louis on October 4.

His investment firm, Wind Capital Group, was helped by a sizable credit authorized in the stimulus, for an energy project in northwest Missouri.

Republicans argue that it’s inappropriate for the Obama campaign to raise money from a donor who has benefited directly from the Recovery Act.

Missouri Republican Party executive director Lloyd Smith compared the situation to the Solyndra affair, in which the Obama administration reportedly rushed federal support to a green-energy firm that subsequently collapsed.

Conservative Republican Congressman Swipes "American Jobs Act" Name

House Democrats failed to file the "American Jobs Act" bill. Now, Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) has appropriated the name for his tax cut bill. If Democrats need a new name, Porkulus II is still available.

(The Foundry) — President Obama repeatedly asked members of Congress to pass the American Jobs Act last week. But when no Democrat filed Obama’s bill after he presented it to Congress, a conservative congressman swiped the name for his own legislation.

The American Jobs Act introduced in the House of Representatives looks quite different from the version President Obama outlined in his speech to Congress. Instead of hiking taxes on working Americans to pay for another stimulus, Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) legislation offers a tax cut.

Read more here...

Porkulus II Doesn't Impress Wall Street

Money quote:

“He delivers a good speech, he just doesn’t say anything.”

Democrats: Hey, Let's Not Call That Stimulus Thing a Stimulus Anymore

Democrats don't want to use the term Stimulus anymore. This is likely due to the fact most Americans have wised up to the fact the Stimulus didn't really stimulate much in the way of new jobs. If they don't like the term Stimulus anymore, I propose they call it Porkulus.

(The Hill) — Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Democrats have dropped the word “stimulus” from their vocabulary.

Though the House minority leader and her caucus are still pushing an economic stimulus agenda to save the economy, they’ve radically changed their rhetoric with the hope of winning over voters who saw “stimulus” as close to a dirty word.

Democrats are now being careful to frame their job-creation agenda in language excluding references to any stimulus, even though their favored policies for ending the deepest recession since the Great Depression are largely the same. . . .

Recognizing the unpopularity of the 2009 package, however, Democratic leaders have revised their message with less loaded language — “job creation” instead of “stimulus” and “Make it in America” in lieu of “Recovery Act” — in hopes of tackling the jobs crisis.

About those alleged stimulus jobs

Half the jobs claimed were employees shifted from one job to another job.

From Commentary:

This is yet another example of why it’s tough to calculate the actual job-stimulating benefits of the stimulus plan. The Recovery Act’s success is typically measured by looking at how many jobs have been created. But there’s also job “shifting,” which happens when a business uses stimulus funds to hire someone who was already employed at another company. And according to a new study from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, that’s been the case with nearly half of the workers hired under the Recovery Act:

Hiring isn’t the same as net job creation. In our survey, just 42.1 percent of the workers hired at ARRA-receiving organizations after January 31, 2009, were unemployed at the time they were hired (Appendix C). More were hired directly from other organizations (47.3 percent of post-ARRA workers), while a handful came from school (6.5 percent) or from outside the labor force (4.1 percent)(Figure 2). Thus, there was an almost even split between “job creating” and “job switching.” This suggests just how hard it is for Keynesian job creation to work in a modern, expertise-based economy: even in a weak economy, organizations hired the employed about as often as the unemployed.

Read more here.

Demo Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.): Obama Promising Jobs With Stimulus Bill Was “Stupidest Thing"

Yarmuth thinks it was stupid because Obama gave a trackable goal. Democrats never want to do that because lack of trackable goals allows them claim their programs worked. Without goals, it is difficult to prove them wrong. Data does not lie.

Chart from House Speaker Boehner.

(The Hill) — Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) slammed President Obama’s promise that the stimulus package would deliver lower unemployment rates as “the stupidest thing that basically any administration probably ever said” in an interview Wednesday with WFPL News.

“I think if you asked them now they will say that was the stupidest thing that basically any administration probably ever said because that’s not something they can necessarily control,” Yarmuth said.

Yarmuth said that while the stimulus plan has worked, the president has been unable to market that success.

Fail: DOE Spent Stimulus Money to Study Climate Change in Maldives, India and Australia.

The Stimulus bill was sold as a job creator. Actually it was a payback for Obama's supporters and their pet projects. It was poorly aimed at job creation.Of course, any honest observer knows the Stimulus failed at job creation.

(CNSNews.com) – The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced last week that it has used $60 million of the $1.2 billion given to the agency in economic stimulus funds for purchasing “advanced-technology research instruments” to study climate change.

Some of this equipment was deployed at facilities in the Maldives, India and Australia.

The DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement, or ARM program, was launched more than two decades ago as a way to improve scientific models for climate research and weather prediction. In a statement released on Aug. 18 on the Recovery.gov Web site – the site tracking the $821-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – ARM is described by the Obama administration as a program focused on climate change.

Unbelievable: Obama says job loses prove stimulus was working or something

Does anybody even listen to this moron anymore?

(CNS News) – Three days after the U.S. Department of Labor reported that the national unemployment rate had ticked up from 9.1 percent in May to 9.2 percent in June, President Barack Obama said that the loss of jobs in the public sector is “evidence” that his $830-billion economic stimulus legislation worked.

“Now, without relitigating the past, I’m absolutely convinced, and the vast majority of economists are convinced, that the steps we took in the Recovery Act saved millions of people their jobs or created a whole bunch of jobs,” Obama said at his Monday press conference.

“And part of the evidence of that is as you see what happens with the Recovery Act phasing out,” he said. “When I came into office and budgets were hemorrhaging at the state level, part of the Recovery Act was giving states help so they wouldn’t have to lay off teachers, police officers, firefighters. As we’ve seen that federal support for states diminish, you’ve seen the biggest job losses in the public sector–teachers, police officers, firefighters losing their jobs.”

Stimulus Jobs Fade Away

We spent $278,000 a job for jobs that were mostly temporary.

(CNSNews.com) — The jobs created or saved by the federal government’s economic stimulus spending are steadily going away, according to a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). As stimulus spending declines, so too does the support it provided to employment.

The report, released late on Friday, July 1, shows that stimulus spending is now supporting fewer jobs than it did in the previous two quarters — supporting approximately 2.4 million jobs in the first quarter of 2011.

According to the report, because stimulus spending is receding, the jobs estimated to have been supported by that spending are beginning to disappear as well. At the height of its effectiveness — the second and third quarters of 2010 — the CEA estimated that the stimulus was supporting 2.7 and 2.8 million jobs respectively.

Average Stimulus Job Cost Taxpayers $278,000

The average stimulus job has cost taxpayers $278,000 per job. Sadly, most of these jobs were only temporary. Can you imagine how many real jobs the private sector could have created with that kind of money?

(Weekly Standard) — When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.

The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.

Alan Greenspan declares the stimulus a failure

 

Federal Reserve Governor Alan Greenspan says there is no evidence the stimulus worked. The 9% (18%?) of Americans unemployed figured this out a long time ago.

(CNBC)- The Federal Reserve's massive stimulus program had little impact on the U.S. economy besides weakening the dollar and helping U.S. exports, Federal Reserve Governor Alan Greenspan told CNBC Thursday.

In a blunt critique of his successor, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Greenspan said the $2 trillion in quantative easing over the past two years had done little to loosen credit and boost the economy.

"There is no evidence that huge inflow of money into the system basically worked," Greenspan said in a live interview.

"It obviously had some effect on the exchange rate and the exchange rate was a critical issue in export expansion," he said. "Aside from that, I am ill-aware of anything that really worked. Not only QE2 but QE1."