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.
