The Hype of ARRA: shovel ready jobs created and saved

Now that even the President as admitted (New York Times) that there never were "shovel ready" projects, the hype and tripe we were fed the past 2 years sound even worse. Plus the subtle message is that the government was doing nothing before Obama descended from the lofty heights of white guilt to save us, despite the fact that President Bush was the biggest spender on social programs in all the history of the U.S., only to be outdone by the raging trillion dollar deficits of Obama!

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) was signed into law by President Obama on February 17th, 2009. It is an unprecedented effort to jumpstart our economy, create or save millions of jobs, and put a down payment on addressing long-neglected challenges so our country can thrive in the 21st century. The Act is an extraordinary response to a crisis unlike any since the Great Depression, and includes measures to modernize our nation's infrastructure, enhance energy independence, expand educational opportunities, preserve and improve affordable health care, provide tax relief, and protect those in greatest need."

If there were challenges "long neglected" then where was Congress--controlled by the Democrats for most of my voting years? Jobs have not been created or saved, and if you laid the graph of our economic ups and downs since 2008 on top of one from the 1930s, you'd see Obama is following FDR's failed template.

The above quote came from the National Eye Institute where I was researching the number of Americans at risk for glaucoma over the age of 40. When I tried to check on how much of ARRA for the NIH (over $10 billion) has been spent, I found "spin doctors" from left wing think tanks and golly gee-whiz writers for government agencies all saying the same thing about saved or created.

Look folks, the health research industry (mainly universities) lives on government grants--this was a huge infusion for NIH, but I seriously doubt hiring a temp researcher or newly minted doctor on a project started 5-10 years ago really "created" anything. The time and effort to solicit and process the grant proposals, plus the special quasi-government companies that sprang up to do all this probably ate up 50% of it. All these jobs are temporary--a bit more glamorous than FDR's CCC camps of the 1930s, but from them we at least got some parks and roads.