Stimulus

Former GOP Congressman and current Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is increasingly frustrated with his party's refusal to address the jobs crisis facing the country.  In a broad interview with The Daily Beast, Secretary LaHood takes republicans to task on a number of issues and their refusal to focus on the economy and jobs and instead work to do everything in their power to defeat President Obama.

“Republicans made a decision right after the election—don’t  give Obama any victories. The heck with putting people to work, because we can score points.”

With hundreds, if not thousands, of bridges across the United States being labeled structurally deficient, LaHood doesn't understand why republicans continue to block much needed infrastructure spending.

Republicans are expected to maintain their wall of opposition to a new round of stimulus spending on infrastructure. The infrastructure bill would put thousands of people to work, says LaHood, “but because of their own personal political feelings against the president, they don’t want to hand him a victory.”

Securing our bridges.  Putting thousdands of Missourians and Americans back to work.  Stimulating the economy.  These are all things republicans continually refuse to do, all in the name of defeating President Obama.  The GOP should be ashamed of themselves.

Branch manager of construction company Emery Sapp and Sons to KY3: "In terms of jobs and job creation, it [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] did exactly what it was intended to do." 

A new report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office suggests that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is responsible from up to 2.9 million people currently having jobs. 

A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report estimates that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) increased the number of people employed by between 1.0 million and 2.9 million jobs as of June.

In other words, between 1.0 million and 2.9 million people employed in June owed their jobs to the Recovery Act. This estimate, by Congress' non-partisan economic and budget analysts, is more comprehensive than the 550,000 jobs that ARRA recipients reported in July, CBO explains.

ThinkProgress notes this morning that the GOP cries to "cancel unused spending" from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in Washington would have a very real impact on jobs and lives back home.  If the foolish plan were to pass, one of the affected projects would be the ongoing work on a new stretch of Highway 141.

Todd Akin was at the groundbreaking for the project, even though he says he hates the stimulus law that financed the deal.  And now he wants to junk it before it's finished.  

As the OMB director Jerry Zients noted, most of the unspent stimulus money the Republicans have targeted is already obligated to specific projects. By cutting off stimulus funds to current projects, Republicans could leave projects half-finished and force mass layoffs at stimulus-funded sites. This wasteful idea is even more cynical given the fact that Republicans have taken credit for major stimulus projects that are still ongoing and could be affected by their new anti-stimulus budget:

Via ThinkProgress, the Congressional Budget Office has issued updated numbers about the stimulus bill passed last year, and found that it “raised the GDP, lowered unemployment, and increased the number of people with jobs.”  Those effects are now "diminishing" as the programs run their course, but here's a summary of the effects Republicans and other stimulus opponents refuse to acknowledge: 

- They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.4 percent and 4.1 percent,

- Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.8 percentage points and 2.0 percentage points,

- Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.6 million, and,

– Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 2.0 million to 5.2 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise (see Table 1). (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers).

The Beacon's Dale Singer writes today about how Republicans who publicly decried federal stimulus spending were more than happy to ask for money in their districts or states.  Rep. Todd Akin and Sen. Kit Bond are featured prominently in the article, but Rep. Roy Blunt and Blaine Luetkemeyer have are more than a little guilty of this hypocrisy too. 

For a few minutes yesterday morning on The Jaco Report, Ed Martin did not sound like the dishonest lunatic we know him to be.  Observe:

Let that soak in for a moment.  Ed Martin -- a man who can't stop talking about the horrors of public programs and government spending - is calling for a rival of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's largest New Deal agency, the Works Progress Administration.

MARTIN:  I live in South City, and you drive down on River Des Peres and you'll see in the bricks the WPA symbol. And what we didn't do -- we took $1.2 trillion in the stimulus -- we didn't do shovel ready jobs.

JACO: Would you have been in favor of those kind of things -- maybe a son of the WPA -- to put people to work immediately on public-sector construction jobs.

MARTIN: Emphatically yes.  I mean, emphatically yes.  And I think places like Highway 21 in Jefferson County, they're desperate to finish the roads. The federal government has a role to play, and I think you and I can talk about how big or small the role is. But public level infrastructure, I think we should have done that. We would have put, put people together. I mean, we built the Zoo, we built the memorials.  We should have said -- and even during the WPA, we sometimes said -- if workers need 20 hours each to build a 40 hour because we have two men that need a job, in this case two men and women, we'll split it up. You get 20 each. I'm emphatically for that.

Never mind for a moment that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included $275 billion available for federal contracts, grants and loans (and $288B in tax cuts that Martin probably doesn't oppose).  Never mind that Missouri just completed the nation's first stimulus-funded shovel-ready project outside of Tuscumbia last week. Or that constructing such projects takes a little bit of time. 

Let's just reflect for a moment on this dramatic shift to the left -- and last-ditch effort for viability as a candidate in the 3rd Congressional District -- in Martin's campaign for Congress.

Host Charles Jaco was understandably confused by Martin's dramatic call for new federal job creation programs.  Near the end of the interview (around the 11:45 mark), he asked, "Are you sure that's not going to get your drummed out of the conservative economic wing of the party?"

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has published a new analysis of how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Stimulus) impacted the economy in the first quarter of 2010.  The highlights:

CBO estimates that in the first quarter of calendar year 2010, ARRA’s policies:

• Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.2 percent,
• Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.5 percentage points,
• Increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 2.8 million, and 
• Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

It looks like Rep. Jo Ann Emerson had a change of heart about attending a local groundbreaking for a new stimulus-funded project in Stoddard County.

As reported over at The Beacon, Emerson was expected to speak at a Thursday ceremony for new facilities at the the Mingo National Wildlife Refuge that will be paid for with federal stimulus money.  Local media reported that Emerson was expected to speak at the event as far back as March 16 -- and as recently as early yesterday morning -- but her office decided yesterday afternoon that she'd rather not be a big hypocrite on the podium. 

Emerson's vote against the stimulus money was "certainly part" of the decision not to attend, her chief of staff said.

Roy Blunt announced a $123,705 federal grant for the Nixa Fire Protection District this week. "The Assistance to Firefighters program has helped many area fire departments, like Nixa, to upgrade their services, equipment, training and effectiveness," Congressman Blunt said in a statement.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (stimulus bill) provided $210 for Assistance to Firefighters Grant, and the FY2010 Homeland Security appropriations bill included $810 million in Assistance to Firefighters Grant money.

Blunt voted against both bills; he was one of just 37 to vote against the Homeland Security budget. 

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released a new "No New Jobs" ad highlighting GOP Senate candidates' opposition to the recently-passed jobs bill. 

The non-partisan Congressional Research Office says last year's stimulus package is responsible for up to 2.1 million jobs in the 4th quarter of last year. From the CBO Director's blog:

Looking at recorded spending to date as well as estimates of the other effects of ARRA on spending and revenues, CBO has estimated the law’s impact on employment and economic output using evidence about how previous similar policies have affected the economy and various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. On that basis, CBO estimates that in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009, ARRA added between 1.0 million and 2.1 million to the number of workers employed in the United States, and it increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by between 1.4 million and 3.0 million.

Saturday:

Republicans — including Missouri’s Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond and Reps. Roy Blunt of Springfield and Blaine Luetkemeyer of St. Elizabeth — are trying to have it both ways. They voted against the stimulus bill and continue to denounce it as they try to take credit for projects that it funded.

Jim Lee has a really interesting story on his Busplunge blog about his trip to the groundbreaking ceremony for Springfield's new Ozone Disinfection System earlier today.  Rep. Roy Blunt was in attendance to get his picture taken on a tour of the city's Brownfields program after the groundbreaking. 

Lee had a simple question for Blunt: What did he think about how the stimulus package was helping Springfield?

"No comment," said Representative Blunt.

The Democratic National Committee has a new web video calling out Sen. Kit Bond and Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer for promoting the benefits of last year's stimulus bill bill in their districts while

New York Times reporter David Leonhardt has a really interesting story that looks at independent analyses of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act one year after passage. 

Leonhardt doesn't dismiss all of the criticisms of the legislation or its implementation, but says Republicans' attention to flaws has been "wildly disproportionate to their importance." 

Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative...

[T]he introduction of the most visible parts of the program — spending on roads, buildings and the like — has been a bit sluggish. Aid to states, unemployment benefits and some tax provisions have been more successful and account for far more of the bill. But their successes are not obvious...

A few weeks ago, Rep. Marilyn Ruestman (R-Joplin) complained to her constituents about how Gov. Jay Nixon "irresponsibly used one-time stimulus funds to balance our budget despite our warnings." 

Confronted with the hypocrisy and inaccuracy of this argument, Ruestman has changed her tune. She is now telling her constituents that using the Recovery Act money in the state budget was the only responsible course of action.

Birther Rep. Tim Jones (R-Eureka) says he can't be held responsible his vote to use federal Recovery Act money in last year's budget because Sen. Claire McCaskill "forced" the legislature to accept $1.3 billion for education and health care expenses. In Jones' latest  newsletter:

This week, Senator McCaskill criticized Missouri's General Assembly and Governor for utilizing the federal stimulus funds to plug major budget gaps that she forced on Missouri over a year ago.

Emphasis in the original. You know the federal government is really getting too powerful when it forces state legislators to draft and pass budgets against their will.

Kit Bond is currently in the running for Countdown's "Hypocrisy Hall of Shame" for trying to have it all ways on Recovery Act spending.  The MSNBC website links to this Kansas City Star Editorial for Bond's "rap sheet." 

Vote early, vote often.

Kit Bond gets a shout out around the 4:35 mark