Obama and the Stimulus: You Can't Make this Stuff Up

There are all sorts of silly anecdotal stories about what Obama is doing with his stimulus money. I'm talking about the process, and in particular, the process of being eligible for stimulus money. If a city/state/project wants stimulus money, they need to fill out dozens and dozens of pages indicating what the project is for. Fair enough. A big part of this process is that companies must provide in detail, the number of jobs they will be saving by accepting the money. If a project would not have cut heads before, they likely will not be eligible for the money because, by definition, there wouldn't be any jobs to save. So in a sense, the government is holding the money ransom unless they save jobs. Of course the lawyers who create and affirm these documents are the jobs that are first saved.

The crazy thing about this is that it's all hypothetical of course. How can anyone ever prove that they would have laid off workers if they did not get the money? But if a company really wants the money, they'll tell the government whatever they want to hear. It's an insane thing to measure, but that's what Obama is doing. The fact that Obama has never held a real private sector job before really shows here.

The reason Obama is doing this is so he can come back to the American public with concrete numbers of how many jobs he has saved, and he'll have it in writing. Pretty self-serving if you ask me.

Imagine if GW asked the general public to sign a document saying the tax cuts would help them beforehand?

No links to this story. Just stories I've heard first and second hand and I hesitate to use company names.