When Superman rescued a small boy who was plummeting toward the depths of Niagara Falls, it was pretty clear that the kid was in danger and that, but for Superman’s ability to fly, the boy would have faced certain death. It goes without saying that if the boy were not in danger, Clark Kent wouldn’t have donned his cape and flown to the rescue.
Well, back to the surreality of modern American politics, it appears that the purported success of President Barack Obama’s Super Stimulus is as fictional as the Man of Steel, but many of the jobs that Obama claimed to save weren’t in need of rescue.
That, of course, didn’t stop his administration from playing hero in California and taking credit for saving some 26,156 jobs, all at the cost of $268.5 million.
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According to the Sacramento Bee:
In a required state report to the federal government, the [California State University] system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees.
That total represents more than half of CSU’s statewide work force. However, university officials confirmed Thursday that half their workers were not going to be laid off without the stimulus dollars.
“This is not really a real number of people,” CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. “It’s like a budget number.”
This story comes on the heels of latest reported jobs numbers, which we at The Foundry have said evidences the objective failure of President Obama’s stimulus. It’s not a pretty report card.
The economy shed another 190,000 jobs in October, bringing the number of jobs lost since Obama was sworn in to 3.8 million. Worse still, the unemployment rate rose from 9.8% to 10.2% percent. With only 130.8 million jobs in the U.S. economy, President Obama is now 7.8 million jobs short of what he promised the American people.
This week, President Obama noted that he holds his daughters to a high standard of academic success and said that, as parents, “You’ve got to set a high bar.”
Perhaps the president should set a higher bar of success for U.S. job growth, recognize the truth behind the failure of his stimulus, see a failing grade for what it is, and leave fantastical tales of dramatic rescues to the experts at DC Comics.