Anyone who thinks the Stimulus Bill didn’t create any jobs needs to read this. Here are the basics:
The money that pays Mr. Davis’s salary, and the salaries of tens of thousands of other people around the country, will dry up after next Thursday, when the welfare program in the stimulus act that pays the bills for those jobs is set to expire. While the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress want to extend the program, they are meeting stiff resistance from Republicans, many of whom oppose all things stimulus.
If the program has encountered hostility from Republicans on Capitol Hill, it has been embraced by some Republican governors who have used it to create jobs in their states.
In Mississippi, an innovative program used the money to pay private companies to hire nearly 3,200 workers, and to pay their salaries on a sliding scale so that the employers would end up paying the entire amount after six months.
Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, described the initiative there as “welfare to work.” Mr. Barbour, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said in an interview last winter that he hoped the program would be extended past this month, since it took so long for the state’s program to get federal approval.
The federal program has helped employ nearly 130,000 adults and has paid for nearly an equal number of summer jobs for young people, according to an analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal policy institute in Washington.
If the program is allowed to lapse, up to 26,000 workers in Illinois will lose their jobs in the coming weeks, along with 12,000 workers in Pennsylvania and thousands more in other states, according to LaDonna Pavetti, the director of the center’s welfare reform and income support division.
“I think that given what we know about the number of people that have been impacted by the recession and the limited jobs available, this has been a lifeline for many families with kids who would otherwise not know when their next rent payment or meal would be coming in,” Dr. Pavetti said.
I’ve heard one Republican after another say that the Stimulus didn’t create any jobs. But, this one little part of the stimulus created 130,000 jobs, many of which will now disappear because the Republicans don’t give a shit about people having jobs.
Anyone who thinks the Stimulus Bill didn’t create any jobs needs to read this.
Boo:
I have a question for you. Shouldn’t Obama be able to exert any influence over Scott Brown? Does that dumb MF’er want to remain in the Senate after 2012? Does he really want to go toe-to-toe with Elizabeth Warren in ’12(because you damn well know there are shitloads of readers at TGOS and elsewhere that would send the last nickel they have if she were to run), or Capuano? That’s a pressure point I don’t think he’s hitting hard enough. The Maine twins aren’t going to cooperate, despite Snowe facing extinction by her own party in ’12.
good post
Very good post! It’s too bad consideration of the policies these ass holes are certain to enact or effectively enact through obstructionism wasn’t given when “progressives” decided that Obama was more of a threat to the future of this country than John Boehner.
Perhaps if OUR President had enacted policies like NAFTA, DODT, DOMA, ushered in the industrial prison complex and modern day enslavement of Black and Brown men through his Omnibus Crime Bill then thought that gave him the political capital to get his penis waxed in the Oval Office as their favorite son did they would have rallied behind him too? Or maybe if he had the conservative Senate voting record of John Edwards and voted for a needless war then reinvented himself as a raging populist all the while paying his mistress through his campaign that would have earned President Obama a little breathing room from white “progressives”? Nah, he still would be Black.
They’re happy to hurt America to help their election chances.
They’re aided in this by self-proclaimed “true progressives” who are certain to blame Obama for this. And will call anyone who disagrees with them “hippie punchers”.
Certain to? They already are! Did you read Krugman today? He’s now ringing the alarm bells that the barbarians are at the gates. And his readers are blaming the ineppitude of white house communications and the President. I’ve made no secret of my dislike and lack of confidence in Obama’s communications team dating back to the primaries, and I was hoping that Axelrod and Jarrett would have enough love for the President not to come to Washington, but fighting against an entire Republican party that sees the election of a Black man as the arrival of the anti-Christ AT THE SAME TIME fighting against a wing of your party who will blame you for everything from not over turning Bill Clinton’s homophobic policies (whom they love despite him enacting more conservative policies than H.W. Bush) to their mothers’ arthritis even the most capable communicators would be challenged. What the fuck did Krugman and the progressive pitch fork mob surrounding the white house from day one of this administration think they were going to accomplish?! While they were monopolized with knee capping the most popular President since Reagan and the mist popular Democratic President since Kennedy the barbarians were stocking their weapons, mapping their strategy, and are now marching towards the capital. Put aside President Obama, do they for a moment realize that they may have helped drive out of office the most progressive Speaker of the House we or our grandchildren will ever see in our lifetime?! That’s going to be the hardest thing for me to witness. Nicely done.
About Clinton’s homophobic policies. Clinton was set to end discrimination against homosexuals in the military by executive order in the first week of his presidency. Anti-gay forces somehow got wind of it and created a media shitstorm that resulted in the Congress passing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which was a compromise to enshrining exclusion in law. This was what ended Clinton’s honeymoon within a week after his inauguration.
And the media shitstorm went on for eight long years. And was unprecedented in its venom for a post-World War II presidency.
They take the stimulus money, use it in programs that work, crow about their own success and say that the stimulus money didn’t create jobs.
Some creative “follow the money” ads would help get this across. With specific projects local to a Congressional District.