Joe Biden was on Meet The Press where he finally admitted that the ‘saved and created‘ jobs his administration keeps touting are really bad guesses from models that did not correctly measure the economic problems or the results of the risky liberal economic experiment known as the stimulus bill.

The Obama administration claims a measly 150,000 jobs were possibly ‘created or saved’ (its a model’s prediction – not a measurement), while over 6,000,000 people are actually now out of work. Even if the guess was true, it equates to 0.025% of the lost jobs. I know Obama and the liberal Democrats want to blame faulty models giving them faulty guesses for their broken promises, but another actual measurement you can trust is the amount of stimulus money actually being spent. The government reports on it weekly.

I have been following the progress of the stimulus money in 5 departments and 1 agency since the bill was passed. Throughout all that time I predicted the stimulus money would not be able to flow for almost a year (being a government contractor I know the long and arduous process all too well). Sadly for America, I was right. Here are the charts on these 6 government organizations, from data as of July 5, 2009.

The first chart shows four sets of columns. The left most is the column of budgeted funds in the stimulus package. As can be seen, the bulk of the ‘shovel ready’ jobs money was going to be in Energy and Transportation. The middle-left columns show the amount of money that has been allocated to specific programs. The middle-right columns show the amount spent to date. I decided to add the far left columns to make clear the amounts unspent. As folks can see the unspent money nearly equals the original budget.

These 5 entities make up 1/3rd of the total jobs money planned for stimulating jobs, and each has spent less than 1% of their money on creating jobs so far. Obama and Biden can try and blame bad guesses, but the hard fact is the lethargic federal bureaucracy has swallowed this money and will not be able to disgorge it for months and months to come. I would be shocked if 1/3rd is spent by the end of summer.

I also added a new chart to show the percentage status – the progress against the budgeted money. Since some departments have massive allocations compared to others, they tend to overwhelm the chart. So this next chart shows the last three columns above as percentages of the first column (allocated funds).  Here the left columns are the percent of the budgeted money allocated to programs. The money can’t even begin to be competed against until it hits this stage. And once contracts are in place the second columns come into play, showing the percent of the allocated funds actually spent (creating jobs). The final set of columns show the percent unspent – stuck in the federal bureaucracy.

 

You can click both charts to enlarge. The totals and percentages for the all the money budgeted, obligated and dispersed  across these 6 entities, as of 6/5/09, are as follows:

• $105,335,650,000 budgeted (~1/3rd total stimulus ‘jobs’ package)
• $20.8 billion obligated (20% of the budgeted total)
• ~$275 million dispersed to actual work (0.26%).

Why is the economy not turning around? Simple, the risky liberal experiment of relying on government programs to stimulate the economy is going nowhere – fast. This all has to do with not knowing what you are doing. The liberal Democrats guessed about the situation in January, guessed about the solution and guessed the federal government was not the blundering behemoth they have been creating for decades. They guessed wrong, wrong and wrong, and America is paying the price.

Tags: Stimulus Bill, Unemployment