"More than 1.6 million jobs have disappeared since the stimulus package was signed in February," says Investor's Business Daily. "Government can't create jobs, only dependency. Make-work jobs will not turn the economy around."
From a new IBD editorial:
The Obama administration, totally unfamiliar with the first rule of holes, has announced it's about to really, really ramp up stimulus spending to create 600,000 jobs this summer. That's on top of the 150,000 jobs it has "saved," though there's no way to identify or measure such jobs.Read the full editorial at the newspaper's Web site.
The unemployment rate, which was never supposed to rise above 8% because of the stimulus, is now approaching 10%. The excuse given is that not enough of the stimulus money has been dispersed.
Monday's announcement of a new and improved stimulus is just old wine in new bottles. In the first 100 days of the stimulus, some $44 billion was spent as jobs continued to hemorrhage. Now we're asked to do more of the same and expect different results.
Obama's 600,000 figure includes 125,000 temporary summer youth jobs and is based on economic projections, not an actual count. The only thing you can accurately count is the number of Americans working — and that's going down fast.
The administration is playing a shell game with its "saved or created" job claims. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said as much to the tax-challenged Timothy Geithner at a March hearing.
Originally posted at TONY PHYRILLAS
