What Republican House Leader John Boehner is doing is a doggone shame. The Ohio congressman has released a video starring a job-sniffing bloodhound named Ellie Mae hot on the trail of stimulus money. Narrated in the down home voice of U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, it begins: “Where are the jobs? We put the dogs on the money trail to find out.”
The money trail takes Ellie Mae to AIG headquarters in New York City, where large bonuses were paid to failing executives, to Wisconsin where repairs are being made to a bridge that carries only 260 cars a year, and to one North Carolina city that hired one person with stimulus money and the worker’s job is to obtain more stimulus funds for the city.
“I’m John Boehner,” the video continues. “This is Ellie Mae. She hasn’t found any jobs yet, and neither have the American people.”
If Boehner had wanted to find any jobs, he could have looked at what’s going on in his own state. According to a June 15 press release by the Ohio Department of Transportation, hundreds of construction-related jobs were created and retained by the awarding of $36.9 million in new contracts.
The release noted, “Combined with the contracts awarded so far using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, ODOT has awarded more than $83.9 million in contracts for work on 52 projects – a combination of interstate, local roadway and bridge modernization projects.” According to updated figures, the total has exceeded $126 million for 58 projects in Ohio.
The website factcheck.org has concluded, “Nationally, the payout of stimulus funds by the federal government is hewing roughly to the schedule predicted by the Congressional Budget Office around the time the bill passed, some economists say. CBO had said that about a quarter of the total money would be spent by the end of 2009, and about 75 percent by the end of the following year.”
That’s the same conclusion reached by the Center on Budget and Policies Priorities, a non-partisan think tank in Washington.
“The law – officially the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – is working as intended and, without it, the economy and the job prospects for many Americans would be worse. The $787 billion in new spending and tax cuts was supposed to slow the economy’s downward spiral and then help it recover over time from what will be the nation’s deepest recession in decades, if not since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”
According to the center, “Some critics of the economic recovery law (or ‘stimulus’ bill) that President Obama and Congress enacted early this year are mischaracterizing how it was supposed to work and what it was supposed to do.”
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities issued a paper titled, “Correcting Five Myths About the Stimulus Bill” by James R. Horney, Nicholas Johnson and Lawrence J. Haas.
1) The recent rise in unemployment does not mean the law is not working. “No mainstream economist believed the law would immediately revive the economy and cause unemployment to begin falling,” the report stated.
2) The administration and Congress expected the stimulus money to be spent gradually over the next two to three years, and what’s been spent to date is stimulating the economy and helping millions of Americans. “CBO estimated that one quarter of the recovery-law spending would occur in fiscal 2009, and has said that the funds already expended have helped strengthen the economy.”
3) The nation faces a very serious long-term budget problem, but the recovery law will exacerbate that problem only a very small amount. “Although the recovery law significantly increases short-run deficits, the fiscal effects of the bill over the long haul are tiny,” the report said. “The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated that the recovery law would add just 3 percent to the budget shortfall through 2050. CBO projects that the law will increase the number of people with jobs by 2.5 million next year. In addition, millions of others will benefit from the higher incomes produced in an economy that is less weak than it otherwise would have been.”
4) The law was specifically designed to help States close their budget gaps. “The recovery law is giving states roughly $140 billion over the next two years in Medicaid and education funding, reducing the $350 billion shortfall by that amount, helping states avoid some of the largest program cuts they were contemplating, and reducing the negative impact of their budget-balancing steps on the economy,” the report stated.
5) States are properly using stimulus funds for short-term projects. “In the recovery law, Congress required that states put their additional federal funds to work as quickly as possible, which in many cases means investing in existing projects and programs rather than mounting new initiatives,” the report said. “That helps to achieve the goals of both stimulating demand for goods and services and of saving or creating as many jobs as possible, as quickly as possible.”
When John Boehner releases his video featuring a dog or otherwise misrepresents the goal and accomplishments of the stimulus plan, he is barking up the wrong tree.
George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, can be reached through his website, www.georgecurry.com.
