"According to Recovery.gov, the stimulus has created 288 jobs in Illinois. From funds received, that’s a cost to taxpayers of $75,173 per job. Wow! No word on jobs “saved.”(What does the Obama administration mean by "jobs saved"? I'm no economist -- Keynesian or otherwise -- so I'm mystified. I must admit, it has occurred to me that it may mean that any American citizen who is still has a job may now thank Obama. But of course that would be silly.)
President Obama signed the stimulus into law in February 2009. Illinois’s unemployment rate was 9.2 percent. Seven months later, Illinois’s unemployment rate hit 10.5 percent in September — a 26 year high." (Read the rest . . .)Not surprisingly, government workers have less to worry about -- for the moment. As I've already said, I'm no economist, but it seems to me that there may be a storm on the horizon for them, too, since the tax revenues used to pay, pension, and perk them on the backs of the rest of us continue to decline at a historic rate.
Will that result in "change"? I doubt it. The political party now in control can continue to blame Bush (or corporations or doctors or Wall Street or insurance companies or executives or capitalism or racists or banks or Joe the plumber . . .) and continue the knee-jerk responses that answer every problem: Raise taxes. Increase spending. Take control. Accuse those who create wealth. The result will be decreased revenue, and increased debt, and a declining economy -- but even that may, at the end of the day, win elections, if they play their blame-cards right. And you can bet, in the meantime, they'll make sure that no good crisis goes to waste.
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