Americans Want Jobs, Not Projects

Conn Carroll / September 03, 2009

The American people rightly believe that President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is a miserable failure. Vice President Joe Biden attempted to convince them other wise today announcing that the Obama administration met or exceeded all ten major projects that they claim defined the Recovery Act in its second 100 days. The New York Times reports:

Biden took on critics who call the stimulus a “grab bag” of too many programs. “It doesn’t reflect a lack of design,” Mr. Biden said in a speech at the Brookings Institution. “That was the design.” Mr. Biden said that the stimulus law was not a “single silver bullet” but rather “silver buckshot.”

The random violence of buckshot is a perfect analogy for Obama’s stimulus. The Vice-President insists on using the number of projects and grants fulfilled as metrics for success. Those measures are meaningless since they take no account of whether the projects are cost beneficial or what affect they have on the economy. The government has never had difficulty shooting tax dollars out the door. The question is how whether that money is wisely spent.  Money spent on the stimulus projects is not available to be invested elsewhere in the economy. (more…)