Free Republic

Three years ago today, in his first major act in office, President Barack Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It stirred a great debate. Some called it too big; others warned it was too meager. With just a handful of exceptions, Republicans maligned it as the absolute wrong approach to creating jobs. • Today, that argument is settled. The Recovery Act did what we asked of it. Three million jobs were created or saved. Essential investments in keeping teachers on the job, building a domestic clean energy industry, and repairing our roads and bridges have helped...

Incentives: Doubling down on industrial policy failure, the administration decides to bump up the taxpayer subsidy for Government Motors' touted electric car. Who said its range wasn't enough to drive us to the poor house? Tucked away in the recesses of President Obama's 2013 budget, a budget that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he will not bring to the Senate floor, is a nugget that speaks volumes about the troubles we're in: While delaying the Keystone XL pipeline, the administration plans to increase the subsidy for the Chevy Volt and other "new technology" vehicles to $10,000 per car. "We...

In November, Accuracy in Media released my report regarding a company known as CH2M Hill, an engineering firm that claimed nearly $2 billion in stimulus awards. Most of their work concentrated on one division - the CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Company (CHPRC) - which operated one of the world’s largest environmental cleanup projects—the Central Plateau on the Hanford Nuclear Site in Richland, Washington. New information shows that despite their claims, the Energy Department says the company actually received $1.38 billion from the stimulus, but had an additional $3.1 billion in annual budget appropriations. Furthermore, they are receiving $2 million in...

The Auburn Hills, Mich., company filed for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Detroit after it was unable to come to terms on an out-of-court deal with its convertible bondholders, according to Michael E. Schostak, director of business development at Energy Conversion Devices.

There’s been a lot of discussion over whether we should have had a smaller or larger stimulus package. But a lot of these arguments leave a key question unanswered: How much stimulus did we actually pass? There was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, of course. That was the big gun. But after that, there were dozens of smaller measures passed. For instance: The White House only put a single year of expanded unemployment insurance into the original stimulus. They did that, in part, because they expected they would be able to get unemployment insurance extended on its own. That...

Fisker Automotive, an electric car maker that received a half-billion-dollar loan from the federal government, said Monday that it has laid off workers in Delaware and California. The layoffs include 26 workers at a former General Motors plant in Wilmington that Fisker is retooling to manufacture its Nina plug-in hybrid sedan. Another 40 contractors and employees who were working in design and development of Fisker’s Karma luxury car in Anaheim, Calif., also have been cut. The layoffs come as Fisker is seeking to renegotiate its loan agreement with the Department of Energy. Fisker has received $193 million of the $529...

Even before he took the oath of office, Barack Obama embraced the financial crisis of 2008.  In the words of his then Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” and Obama saw the recession as an opportunity for him to play investor picking winners and losers with hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars.  This was his moment to “transform” the American economy to match his vision for a brave new world.  Lavishing billions on green technology was high on Obama’s list of favorites.  In just three years, his Administration has pumped $80 billion into...

Stunning. That’s really the only word we can use to describe the release of a “sensitive and confidential” 57 page memo, written by then soon-to-be U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in December 2008, about what became President Obama’s signature economic program in the first year of his presidency: the “stimulus package”. James Pethokoukis has summarized some of the most significant aspects of the memo, which we’ve excerpted below, and which reveals the Obama administration’s thinking behind what became an over 821 billion dollar boondoggle. The bold text represents Pethokoukis’ summary of that thinking, which is directly followed by a supporting...

Professor Brad DeLong at University of California at Berkeley has an interesting blog entitled “Monetary Policy: The Federal Reserve Is Doing It Wrong…” He argues, like Paul Krugman and James Hamilton, that inflation is TOO LOW. Therefore, The Fed should set higher inflation targets in order to increase employment. In other words, like Madonna from the film “Dick Tracy,” they want the Fed to do “More.” But why is The Fed having difficult creating inflation as Krugman, DeLong and Hamilton would like? Do we need MORE monetary intervention or is The Fed out of ammunition? I would argue that the...

Earlier this week, Stimulus beneficiary Evergreen Energy bit the dust. Then, Ener1, a manufacturer of batteries for electric vehicles and recipient of Stimulus largesse, filed for bankruptcy. And today, the Las Vegas Sun reports that Amonix, Inc., a manufacturer of solar panels that received $5.9 million from the Porkulus, will cut two-thirds of its workforce, about 200 employees, only seven months after opening a factory in Nevada. I foresaw this spate of bad news last November. As I explained yesterday, In a previous post, I compared renewable energy spending in the 2009 Stimulus to a green albatross burdening the President....

Blame Game: News reports about a December 2008 White House stimulus memo claim it proves the stimulus was too small. What it really does is expose how Obama has misled the country about his economic policies. The memo, written by Larry Summers — President Obama's top economic adviser at the time — shortly after the election, outlined the thinking of his economic team about the best size and make-up of a stimulus package. News reports about the memo, which came to light this week, have focused on Summers' warnings that the government could spend only so much money in any...

Obama-backed electric car battery-maker files for bankruptcy By Andrew Restuccia - 01/26/12 11:55 AM ET An Indiana-based energy-storage company, whose subsidiary received a $118.5 million stimulus grant from the Energy Department, filed for bankruptcy Thursday. Ener1 is asking a federal bankruptcy court in New York to approve a plan to restructure the company’s debt and infuse $81 million in equity funding. “This was a difficult, but necessary, decision for our company,” Ener1 CEO Alex Sorokin said in a news release. “We are extremely pleased to have the strong support of our primary investors and lenders to substantially reduce the company’s...

Eleven Stunning Revelations From Larry Summers’s Secret Economics Memo To Barack Obama By James Pethokoukis January 23, 2012, 3:08 pm A lengthy piece in The New Yorker looks at policymaking in the Obama White House. A key source for writer Ryan Lizza is a 57-page, “Sensitive & Confidential” memo written by economist Larry Summers—eventually to be head of Obama’s National Economic Council—to Obama in December 2008. Here’s some of what I learned about Team Obama’s thinking as the financial crisis was exploding, followed by quotes from the memo itself: 1. The stimulus was about implementing the Obama agenda The short-run...

Media Bias: A presidential infomercial posing as a news magazine distorts the record to shamelessly shill for a failed administration. Why do we criticize the man who made the high-speed trains run on time? Political campaigns call it free media: when candidates can make their case and communicate their message through interviews and outlets that don't cost a dime. It helps when a mainstream media sycophant like Andrew Sullivan gets to write a puff piece in Newsweek with the subtle title of "Why Are The President's Critics So Dumb?" The Democratic National Committee couldn't have said it better. Calling the...

Chicano Park gets makeover SAN DIEGO— Artists restore cultural paintings in Chicano Park. “As a young artist I remember coming to San Diego and thinking ‘gosh I wish I could have a mural up at Chicano park,’” painter Mario Chacon said. The bright art pieces have brought people to Chicano Park since the 1970’s, but time has taken it’s toll. Thanks to a $1.6 million grant from the federal government, 18 of the murals are being restored. The artists working on the restoration said each painting has significant symbolism. “What was placed at the top of the mural was a...

The stimulus was the very first order of business in the obama white house. As Rahm Emanuel famously said. "never let a crisis go to waste." They didn't. The stimulus was the biggest most wasteful most larded up boondoggles in us history - and it failed miserably to achieve its stated goals. Emphasis on "stated" - because the real goals were not the stated ones. the real goal was to funnel taxpayer money to the machine - and then lock it in for years to come. How would they lock it in? simple: just don't pass a real budget. Run...

(Iselin, NJ) -- Two Federal Reserve officials are telegraphing support for more action to invigorate the nation's economy. The president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank wants moves to help the housing market.

Many Americans are no doubt making resolutions to eliminate their bad habits in the New Year. The federal government would be well advised to do the same. President Obama and members of Congress could start by reviewing the jaw-dropping report put out by Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) outlining 100 examples — totaling more than $6.5 billion — of wasteful federal spending over the past year alone. What follows is a collection of some of the more outrageous examples.� $120 million paid out in retirement and disability payments to deceased federal workers. According to the Inspector General of the...

No wonder the stimulus didn't work. Download the RNC briefing book: "My Wall Street Guy: Barack Obama & Jon Corzine"

Green Policy: A think tank crunches the subsidy and bailout dollars and puts the true cost of Government Motors' electric car at a cool quarter-million. And the few sold have been largely bought by the 1%. At a time when Democrats are blaming the GOP for blocking a payroll tax cut deal that will add $40 in the average paycheck, they have no problem taking that worker's tax dollars to make and subsidize what we once called an electric Edsel bought by a precious few with an average income of $170,000. "Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as...

If Tolkien was right, that the burned hand teaches best, then a question arises: Will President Obama ever learn? In a recent appearance on "60 Minutes," Obama traded in his old analogy about the car in the ditch for a new one, about a ship in rough seas. No matter how well the captain — Obama — steers it, if the ship is being tossed about with violent abandon, then the passengers will not enjoy the ride. The implication is that Obama is doing a fine job, so don't blame him. The president is right, in part: The voters should...

If it is built, California’s High-Speed Rail would be the largest public works project in state history. That fact alone appears be intoxicating to state officials, in a perpetual quest to have California be the first state to do anything. Despite the warnings of a nearly $100 billion ballooning price tag, no track laid, no trains running, decreasing legislative support and even opposition from diehard rail advocates, the High-Speed Rail Authority is steaming ahead full throttle with plans to build the most expensive high-speed rail system in history. But there is pushback coming from so many places that it must...

Actual title is : Outrage! Author of ‘stimulus’ tied to companies funded by bill: Received hundreds of millions in government grants, loans. (not enough space to put it as it was written) An advisor to President Obama who played a key role in developing the energy provisions of the so-called stimulus bill has graced the board of several companies that recently received government funds, including hundreds of million in “stimulus” money. TJ Glauthier served on Obama’s 2008 White House Transition Team. He is widely credited with helping to craft the energy provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of...

The founder of an energy company that benefited from deals involving hundreds of millions in “stimulus” money made the maximum donation allowable to President Obama’s inauguration, WND has learned. Peter L. Corsell, founder of GridPoint Inc., contributed $50,000 to the inauguration. Corsell served as the Gridpoint’s chief executive officer from the company’s inception until transitioning to the position of non-executive chairman in October, 2010. Yesterday, KleinOnline broke the story that an Obama adviser who played a key role in developing the energy provisions of the so-called stimulus bill serves on the boards of Gridpoint as well as several other companies...

An adviser to Barack Obama who played a key role in developing the energy provisions of the so-called stimulus bill has served on the boards of several companies that recently received government funds, including hundreds of millions in "stimulus" money. TJ Glauthier served on Obama's 2008 White House Transition Team. He is widely credited with helping to craft the energy provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the "stimulus." In addition to serving on the boards of major energy companies, Glauthier previously held two presidential appointments during the Clinton administration. He was the Energy...

Buried within the Congressional Budget Office's most recent report on the progress of President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a surprising admission: the CBO now estimates the stimulus might have been only half as effective as previously thought. You wouldn't know it from the headlines. "Stimulus added up to 3.3M jobs," reads a representative piece from Politico reporting on the November CBO report. This headline is accurate for the high-end estimate. That estimate, however, is essentially unchanged from previous reports. In the past, the CBO's low estimate for jobs "created or saved" was 1.2 million which, in this...

Ecofanaticism: SolyndraGate was no isolated case of corrupt government misspending. The U.S. Navy was just forced to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuels from an Obama-connected firm at an outrageous $16 per gallon. The massive Obama stimulus was supposed to generate millions of jobs, but the $535 million loan guarantee it gave to solar panel maker Solyndra on the eve of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy illustrated the fundamental incompetence of Obama's neo-Keynesian economic ideology. Now we find the Navy partnering with the Agriculture Department to purchase hundreds of thousands

Jobs: The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada. There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree. You can see why the economy is in trouble. Vice President Joe Biden, the stimulus sheriff, says he turned first to MF Global's Jon Corzine for economic advice and President Obama thinks 20,000 people getting extended unemployment benefits does more for the economy than 20,000 people getting paychecks to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. In the president's view, extending the payroll tax cuts...

In his January 2011 State of the Union speech, President Obama called for ”more research and incentives” so that America could ”become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.” In yesterday’s Washington Post, Carol Leonnig and Joe Stephens report that the Obama Administration “has poured roughly $5 billion dollars in taxpayer funds into the electric car industry, offering incentives to manufacturers, their suppliers and even car buyers who might want to go green.” This included $2.4 billion in Stimulus support to develop advanced batteries for all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. How’s it all...

Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong each killed tens of millions of people, and John Maynard Keynes was a pacifist who never fired a shot in anger. However economically, when the billions come to be totted up, it may well be the case that Keynes was the most destructive of the four. He cannot entirely be blamed for mistakes in monetary policy, which he never understood, and even his “stimulus” ideas owed much to those who came before him – for example Arthur Pigou – and after him – for example Joan Robinson. Yet the other value destroyers had...

Kicking The Can Down The Road Will Officially Stop Working In 2013Sunday, December 4, 2011Bruce Krastering Luis Echeverria became president of Mexico in 1970. These were troubled times for the country. By the end of his term in 1976 every economic variable was running off the rails. Huge inflation, current account, trade and big budget deficits. To keep the economy alive numerous steps were taken to kick the can down the road through the next election. The most dangerous efforts that Mexico took were in its debt profile. The public and private sector was borrowing in dollars. The worst part...

Common Sense vs. Nonsense: Bankrupting the Future –By: Larry Walker, Jr. –Facts: The 2% payroll tax cut not only boosted workers’ take-home pay by $120 billion in 2011, but it also widened the government’s budget deficit, and left the social security trust fund in the red.Since Social Security and Medicare taxes are collected in order to realize future benefits, why would the federal government choose to refund a portion of those collections today? Are its entitlement programs in such good shape that the government can afford to distribute benefits prematurely? I don’t think so. For that would infer that...

You may not have seen the show "Diary of a Single Mom" co-starring Billy Dee Williams, but your tax dollars helped pay for it. Through the federal economic stimulus program, a company owned by actor-director Robert Townsend was paid more than $230,000 to produce and direct the Web-based show, records show. Other production costs on the show paid to different vendors total more than $700,000. The money came through an award by the Department of Commerce to One Economy Corp. for more than $28 million last year to help boost broadband Internet service in underserved areas across the country.

Left-wing ideologues like Paul Krugman posing as economists believe that the reason why the Obama stimulus dumped upon us didn't work is because it wasn't big enough.  Krugman points to statistics that show a clear relationship between stimulus spending and corollary increases in economic activity in Europe and the U.S.  His statistics also show decreases in economic activity when spending stops.  He stops there, arrogantly believing that he pointed out an obvious truth that all should understand and approve of, and the U.S. government should, therefore, "invest" huge sums of borrowed money into the economy.  (This is not atypical short-sightedness...

Recovery: After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it cost more than advertised, did less to boost growth and will hurt the economy in the long run. In its latest quarterly report on the economic effects of the Obama stimulus, the CBO sharply lowered its "worst case" scenario while trimming many of its upper-bound estimates for stimulus-fueled growth and employment. The new report finds, for example, that the stimulus may have added as little as 0.7% to GDP growth in 2010 — when spending was at its peak — and created as...

About 15 percent of black students in St. Paul were suspended at least once last year, compared with 3 percent of whites. To address the problem, the district decided in 2009 to spend about $450,000 of $58 million it received through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to institute the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) program. The program requires administrators and teachers to periodically evaluate their school rules and determine which ones call for suspensions and which call for lesser punishments. They're also encouraged to be more explicit about what is expected of students in order to be successful...

From Big Government’s Wynton Hall: Billionaire George Soros gave advice and direction on how President Obama should allocate so-called “stimulus” money in a series of regular private meetings and consultations with White House senior advisers even as Soros was making investments in areas affected by the stimulus program. It’s just one more revelation featured in the blockbuster new book that continues to rock Washington, Throw Them All Out, authored by Breitbart News editor Peter Schweizer. Mr. Soros met with Mr. Obama’s top economist on February 25, 2009 and twice more with senior officials in the Old Executive Office Building on...

British embassies in the eurozone have been told to draw up plans to help British expats through the collapse of the single currency, amid new fears for Italy and Spain. As the Italian government struggled to borrow and Spain considered seeking an international bail-out, British ministers privately warned that the break-up of the euro, once almost unthinkable, is now increasingly plausible. Diplomats are preparing to help Britons abroad through a banking collapse and even riots arising from the debt crisis. The Treasury confirmed earlier this month that contingency planning for a collapse is now under way. A senior minister has...

As every major developed economy hits Bass's Keynesian Endgame, the status quo is set to change dramatically. Nowhere is this climax playing out louder than in Europe and the implicit solution of Germany-uber-alles (while seemingly inevitable though nevertheless lengthy in execution) is likely to not sit well with many of the EMU nations. To wit, The Telegraph today reports that Britain's Foreign Office is advising its overseas embassies to draw up plans to help expats should the collapse of the Euro turn explosive. Almost incredibly, a senior minister has revealed that Britain is now planning on the basis that a...

Corruption: The Secretary of Energy takes responsibility for and defends the granting of a half-billion-dollar-loan guarantee to an imploding solar panel maker. But that's not where the campaign donor buck stopped. In testimony Thursday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Steven Chu, caught in a tangled web of administration deceit regarding a $535 million guaranteed loan to Solyndra, tried but failed to continue the administration line that the affair was just a good-faith bet that went bad. "As the Secretary of Energy, the final decisions on Solyndra were mine, and I made them with the best interest of the...

In a blow to the Obama administration, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that the president’s economic stimulus plan created fewer jobs than expected and “crowds out” private investment. A new report the CBO released on Tuesday finds that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act may have boosted the economy in the short run by sustaining some 700,000 jobs at its peak in 2010 but “will reduce output slightly in the long run — by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.” The report estimates that the total number of jobs the plan produced was far fewer than the...

Industrial Policy: Not only do taxpayers subsidize failing green energy here, they may soon be on the hook for a Department of Energy loan to a firm owned by a Russian billionaire. Just say nyet. When a foreign firm wants to build a facility in the U.S. that hires American workers and pays American taxes, we welcome it. We'd prefer they do it with their own money, not rely on this administration's failed industrial policy to provide them with a huge taxpayer-backed loan — especially when it's owned by a billionaire who doesn't need the help. The administration's latest green...

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday downgraded its estimate of the benefits of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, saying it may have sustained as few as 700,000 jobs at its peak last year and that over the long run it will actually be a net drag on the economy. CBO said that while the Recovery Act boosted the economy in the short run, the extra debt that the stimulus piled up “crowds out” private investment and “will reduce output slightly in the long run — by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.” The analysis confirms what CBO predicted before...

Boondoggles: With the administration's approval, the recipient of another half-billion-dollar loan to build electric cars is outsourcing the work and any jobs that might be created or saved to Finland. The Fisker Karma electric car, heralded two years ago by Vice President Joe Biden as the future of the American auto industry, may prove to be another administration "bad bet," just as President Obama called Solyndra, heralded by Biden as the future of American energy. "Folks, we're making a bet," Biden said Oct. 27, 2009, using a familiar administration metaphor. "We're making a bet on the future, we're making a...

by John HillStand With Arizona The war against Alabama's immigration law has intensified in recent weeks, with a Justice Department lawsuit, visits by DOJ officials, and a showdown over illegal alien children who have been pulled from Alabama schools. Eric Holder sued Alabama, trying to block every aspect of its enforcement provision. Why has the Administration and their ACLU and La Raza allies frantically tried to stop Alabama's law from being enforced? Because it's WORKING - and putting legal Alabamans back to work. As illegals have fled the state by the tens of thousands, the jobs they took -...

NRO's Andrew Stiles flags this exchange from Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf's testimony before the Senate Budget Committee ealier this week: (Insert video segment) The quote that matters starts around 1:25, when Elmendorf says that, according to CBO's estimates, with the stimulus legislation in place, "the level of GDP would be a little lower at the end. That is, a net negative effect on the growth of GDP over 10 years." Elmendorf then confirms that CBO estimates that the economic drag will continue in the following decade: SESSIONS: And in the next 10 years, since you’re carrying that debt...

Texas Rep. Ron Paul, long dismissed by the GOP establishment as a fringe candidate, has broadened his electoral appeal and emerged as a major player in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, according to several recent polls and conversations with a handful of longtime Hawkeye political operatives... In a Bloomberg News survey — conducted by renowned Iowa-based pollster Ann Selzer — Paul was in a four-way statistical tie for first along with businessman Herman Cain, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich... And, in a new Iowa State/Gazette/KCRG survey, Paul took 20 percent — behind only Cain...

If we were to choose three of Barack Obama’s words to sum up his failed presidency, it would be “spending equals stimulus.” Obama naively believes that any government spending–it scarcely matters on what–has a positive impact on our economy. He completely fails to understand (or, at any rate, to acknowledge) that wasteful spending destroys wealth and, in the long run, kills jobs. Thus, even though the Democrats’ $800 billion-plus stimulus bill was an abject failure, they have nothing to offer Americans but more of the same. On Tuesday, Doug Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office, testified before the Senate...

President John F. Kennedy’s nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., netted a $1.4 billion bailout for his company, BrightSource, through a loan guarantee issued by a former employee-turned Department of Energy official. It’s just one more in a string of eye-opening revelations by investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer in his explosive new book, Throw Them All Out. The details of how BrightSource managed to land its ten-figure taxpayer bailout have yet to emerge fully. However, one clue might be found in the person of Sanjay Wagle. Wagle was one of the principals in Kennedy’s firm who raised money for Barack...