Jobs created or saved by ARRA stimulus? Much of it was pure fiction

By David McElroy · September 27, 2011

The Obama administration has claimed that “stimulus” spending created or saved 300,000 to 400,000 jobs each quarter while its money was being doled out. Does anybody seriously believe that number? I don’t.

I was already a skeptic — to put it most politely — of such self-serving econometrics, but two things this week have made me even more skeptical.

First, a source who can’t be identified provided me with copies of documents that his company was required to fill out as a vendor on a contract that it was awarded by a school district. It was made clear to the company that it was expected to report that jobs created and saved, so that’s exactly what the report back to the district showed. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 workers had jobs only because of this project, according to the paperwork reported back to the federal government. In truth, nobody was hired just for the project. Nobody would have been fired if the project hadn’t come along.

The lie was just a formality to get a contract — so the school district could report the lie to the federal government and politicians could pretend to be creating and saving jobs. My source said it was clear to everyone in his industry that you were supposed to provide the paperwork and keep your mouth shut:

“This project was going to be built anyway, but the school district didn’t have to use local money to do it because this stimulus thing came along to pay for it instead. The district knew we weren’t creating jobs and we knew it, too, but it was in everybody’s interest to just give them the government the numbers they wanted and us and the school both got what they wanted. That was happening everywhere during that stimulus spending.”

The second piece of the puzzle comes from somewhere less anecdotal. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University just released a study based on extensive interviews with companies and their employees (as well as anonymous surveys inside the companies). You can read the introduction to the study here or download the PDF of the full study here.

The authors of the study concluded that the “stimulus” had very little effect, if any. You can hear George Mason economics professor Garett Jones talk about the study, its conclusions and its potential limitations on last week’s EconTalk podcast if you’d like the basic information without reading the full study.

I have no confidence in the theory behind Keynesian stimulus spending. I have no confidence in statistics reported by companies and government agencies with an incentive to lie. I have no confidence in politicians to seek the truth when the numbers on their reports say what they want them to say.

So what did that add up to? Well, unemployment is even higher now than what we were told ahead of time that the worst-case employment scenario was before the “stimulus” was passed. It doesn’t look good for Keynesian ideas after all this, does it?

Almost three years ago, NPR had a story that talked about Barack Obama giving Keynes’ ideas their first “real-world test.” If that was the test, isn’t it obvious that the ideas are flawed and don’t work? Isn’t it time to admit that the faith which the Keynesian-influenced economists have in their “stimulus” spending has nothing empirical behind it? Isn’t it time to consider an alternative — from the real free market school of thought?

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I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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