Did The Stimulus Create Any Employment?

   Well, of course it did but you would not know it when listening to the Republicans talking. the GOP had made it plain after Barack Obama and the Democrats took over that they would do anything possible to make sure that Obama got nothing done while in the White House, and they have kept their word. So now,with the mid-terms only a few short weeks away the Democrats are looking at some pretty good losses in both the House and the Senate because no one paid attention to the “dead” Republican party which would not see a return to any sort of power in the near future. The Democratic party has been sleeping at the wheel and so have the American people. This is what the Republicans can count on year after year.

    Here are the Republicans at work spreading their falsehoods.

FastCheck

The economic stimulus package is a favorite target of Republican candidates and groups, but more than a few ads falsely claim it did not create or save any jobs. Some recent examples:

• Republican House candidate Dan Debicella charges that Democratic Rep. Jim Himes failed Connecticut’s families because he voted for a "stimulus package that has done nothing to reduce unemployment."
• Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for governor in Florida, says Democrat Alex Sink "backed the failed stimulus bill, which created debt, not jobs."
• Similarly, Sink — who never served in Congress and didn’t vote on the bill — is attacked by the Republican Party of Florida in an ad that says the stimulus "gave us big debt and no jobs."
• Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group that does not have to disclose its donors, aired an ad against Democratic congressional candidate Denny Heck of Washington that claimed the "$787 billion stimulus … failed to save and create jobs." The group has launched similar ads against other Democrats.
• Kristi Noem, a Republican House candidate from South Dakota, calls the measure a "jobless stimulus."

The truth is that the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million people, compared with what employment would have been otherwise. That’s according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

 

Analysis

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, more commonly known as the stimulus bill, has been featured in more than 130 TV ads this year, according to a database maintained by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. In many of those ads, Republicans claim the bill has "failed" (a matter of opinion) or state (correctly) that unemployment has gone up since President Barack Obama signed the bill into law on Feb. 17, 2009. The national unemployment rate was 8.2 percent in February 2009, and it now stands at 9.6 percent, having peaked at 10.1 percent in October 2009.

But it’s just false to say that the stimulus created "no jobs" or "failed to save and create jobs" or "has done nothing to reduce unemployment" – or similar claims that the stimulus did not produce any jobs.

As we have written before, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report in August that said the stimulus bill has "[l]owered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points" and "[i]ncreased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million."

Simply put, more people would be unemployed if not for the stimulus bill. The exact number of jobs created and saved is difficult to estimate, but nonpartisan economists say there’s no doubt that the number is positive.

 

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Is America A Scared Country?

   Posted at Watching America

A Frightened Superpower

By Ansgar Graw
Translated By Ron Argentati

Edited by Sam Carter

9/11, the economic crisis, China: Americans are afraid. For the first time, their pioneer spirit seems to have reached its limits.
Jokes about German Anxiety were popular for many years in the English-speaking world. In past decades, Germans in the old Federal Republic worried about Soviet nuclear weaponry and worried even more about their ally America and the upgrades to their own nuclear arsenal. After that, Germans feared a new ice age, acid rain, dying forests, nuclear energy and the greenhouse effect. “German Angst” was defined in American dictionaries as the German propensity for brooding and insecurity.
But almost unnoticed, the term “Angst” got separated from the modifier “German” some years ago. How the Germans managed the east-west reunification of their nation, their approach to reforming social systems and the deployment of German troops to Afghanistan all contributed to the decline of the German stereotype that, according to the lyric poet Hölderlin, was “all thought but little action.”

  The Chinese want to take over the world:
Meanwhile, insecurity has spread throughout the United States; it’s an insecurity that just doesn’t befit a 20th century world superpower. Americans are anxious. Not only do they fear terrorists; they’re afraid of Islam and even mosques, whether they’re near ground zero or in the backwoods of Tennessee. They’re afraid of Sharia law, something that a whole two percent of American Muslims would like to see included in the U.S. Constitution. They fear India, free trade and, above all, they’re afraid of China. A salesman at Sears sighs, “This vacuum cleaner is made in China and so is this microwave and even this coffee pot. The Chinese want to take over the world. I hope I’m not around to see that.”
Americans are afraid that the United Nations is interfering in their affairs. They’re afraid that Europe, and especially Germany, exports too much. Americans are afraid of illegal immigrants as well as Wall Street; afraid of big government at the same time they fear the government is too weak to protect them. They fear progress and they fear stagnation. They fear more of Obama and they fear a return of George W. Bush.

America Has Always Suffered Setbacks:
With all the despondency apparent in the debate, the United States no longer reminds us of the nation that was victorious in two world wars; a nation that eradicated the Soviet Union with a Cold War; a country that landed men on the moon and paved the way for the Internet and the digital revolution.
The fact that the U.S.’s attempts to export democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan have failed so far were setbacks. But setbacks have been common throughout American history. The Sputnik shock and Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight seemed to signal the final triumph of communism over capitalism in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But instead of becoming paralyzed, the United States came back with the Apollo space program. Neither the defeat in Vietnam nor the humiliating Iranian takeover of their embassy in Tehran was enough to send the American people into post-traumatic soul-searching.

Callers Were Asked Whether They Spoke English or Spanish

So what’s different now? Why do Americans, whom Robert Kagan described as being from Mars, now come off whinier than the Europeans, whom he decreed came from Venus? Is it because of the global financial crisis that put an end to the belief in limitless growth? Or is it because of the ongoing diversification of society? People calling government offices or large firms in America get an answering machine that inquires whether they speak English or Spanish.
Many Americans worry, “Where has the real America gone?” And the tea party, which came about as an outgrowth of the conservative longing for easily understood differences, frightens those progressives who feel reforms aren’t coming quickly enough.

“Real Americans” Are a Disappearing Breed

In this patchwork nation, “real Americans” are hard to find. But there is something called an average American whose principal trait is eternal optimism. Even American traditionalists have always been forward rather than backward looking. But these days, many Americans are losing faith in tomorrow due to their country’s economic weakness and the rise of new powerhouses, mainly in Asia. For the first time in history, the American pioneer spirit seems to have hit a brick wall geographically, globally, economically and ideologically.
The United States needs new goals. Americans need to go from being large-scale consumers to being exporters again; they need to create new jobs — in the renewable energy sector, for instance. They need to use their super powers to integrate Hispanics and Muslims into their society. It won’t be an easy task, but mastering “American Angst” is an absolute necessity, not only for the U.S. but for Europe as well.

 

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