Stimulate This

Hey, that stimulus is working out great... um, okay, maybe not, but the economy and unemployment would be far worse without it.... oh, damn...

Ten months into President Barack Obama's first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.

Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn't matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama's argument that more road money would address an "urgent need to accelerate job growth."

Obama wants a second stimulus bill from Congress that relies in part on more road and bridge spending, projects the president said are "at the heart of our effort to accelerate job growth."

Construction spending would be a key part of the Jobs for Main Street Act, a $75 billion second stimulus to revive the nation's lethargic unemployment rate and improve the dismal job market for construction workers. The House approved the bill 217-212 last month after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., worked the floor for an hour; the Senate is expected to consider it later in January.

AP's analysis, which was reviewed by independent economists at five universities, showed that strategy hasn't affected unemployment rates so far. And there's concern it won't work the second time. For its analysis, the AP examined the effects of road and bridge spending in communities on local unemployment; it did not try to measure results of the broader aid that also was in the first stimulus like tax cuts, unemployment benefits or money for states.

"My bottom line is, I'd be skeptical about putting too much more money into a second stimulus until we've seen broader effects from the first stimulus," said Aaron Jackson, a Bentley University economist who reviewed AP's analysis.

Even within the construction industry, which stood to benefit most from transportation money, the AP's analysis found there was nearly no connection between stimulus money and the number of construction workers hired or fired since Congress passed the recovery program. The effect was so small, one economist compared it to trying to move the Empire State Building by pushing against it.

Apparently, the only thing that's shovel-ready is the BS.

Drew over at Ace of Spades gives credit to the AP for joining the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and becoming a non-news organization by actually reporting the problems with the stimulus. He also draws a pretty good analogy...

I used to know a guy who worked for the state DMV. He used to claim that his department 'made money' because they took in more than their budget. Try though I might, I could never quite get him to understand the difference between confiscating wealth and creating it. Now it seems people like him are running the government.

The best part about this analysis is they actually take on Obama's claim that you can't look at just the county where the money is spent because workers can come from all over. The AP looked at 700 counties that received project money and 700 that didn't. Unemployment trends were the same in both samples.

You know, I'm not having much trouble picturing Obama, or Joe Biden and Tim Geithner, running the DMV. And that's not a good thing.