Touched By An Angle

August 27, 2010

If you listen closely, you can actually hear the conversation that went on in the White House.

“Jobs saved or created? What on earth does that mean?”

“Well, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s simply a meaningless phrase that will allow us to claim that the stimulus is working when anyone with a pair of eyes can see it isn’t true.”

“But it’s not working. We thought those gullible fools who swallowed all that ‘hope and change’ snake oil would believe it. Let’s face it, if they believed what the President said during the campaign, we figured they’ll believe anything. But they’re not believing this. Damn you, Glenn Beck! A pox on Fox!”

“We need a new angle. Some new phrase that will touch the lives of the rubes in the same way that ‘hope and change’ did. Something that will allow us to make even more grandiose claims about our stunningly successful stimulus.”

“Touch their lives? Joe Biden, you’re a genius!”

And so now there is a new metric to determine the success of the stimulus. “Lives Touched.”

No. Really.

From Mental Recession:

A spokesperson from the CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company explains:

“Lives Touched” is a figure that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) uses to track the amount of people who have been positively affected by the Recovery Act funds. This total would include people who have been provided full time employment (i.e. saved and created jobs) through the Recovery Act and people who at some point have supported a project funded by the Recovery Act.

The reporting instructions indicate what constitutes a life that has been touched by the stimulus:

Reporting Data
1. Report the “Lives touched” headcount for all ARRA-funded contracts or releases
1. Total number of workers who have directly charged 1 or more hours of work time to a CHPRC contract.
2. A worker who charges time to more than one contract or contract release is counted as one life touched.
3. The “lives touched” headcount will remain the same or increase over time as new workers become involved with ARRA contracts. The total headcount will never decrease.
4. Administrative/Overhead personnel included in indirect rate pools should not be counted unless they are working full time on the ARRA funded contract.
5. Separate the headcount into labor categories on the reporting spreadsheet—but DO NOT separate the headcount by contract release.

Translating the bureaucratese into English: any person who worked for one hour or more on a project that received any stimulus money is counted as a “life touched.” Even if the person in question worked only one hour, the headcount is added to the list and never removed even though the person is no longer working.

The result of this is that instead of using made up numbers and claiming them as job created or saved, they can now make up even bigger numbers and claim that these lives were “touched” by the stimulus.

At the most comical element of this farce, this is a warp speed spin. At it’s core, this is all too emblematic of the contempt in which this administration and Washington D.C. in general holds the American people. It all boils down to this: If they’re not buying the lie, change the wording. It’s a new angle on the same old withering disdain that these people have for you and me. They believe that we are so stupid that if we don’t believe one lie, we might believe a bigger lie.

Well, we’re not going to fall for this one, either.

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Posted by Blaknsam

Porkulus II: The Next Day; UPDATED

July 10, 2009

Michelle Malkin’s been on fire recently. Her syndicated column today is a neat evisceration of the stimulus package that was guaranteed to keep unemployment below 8% (currently at 9.5%).

The first stimulus package was nothing more than a fiscal boondoggle designed to pay off political cronies like the unions and areas that voted for Obama (H/T: Around The Sphere) and was loaded down with some of the most ridiculous pork projects ever seen.

Expectations for a second round of stimulus are for more of the same. The fact is that Obama isn’t particularly interested in stimulating the economy. If he was, he would be slashing taxes across the board, loosening regulations on industry and corporations, cutting the capital gains tax, and balancing the Federal budget. I’ve noticed that whenever Obama says, “We don’t want to do this…” then it’s time to hang onto your wallet. If he didn’t want to do these things, he wouldn’t.

Obama’s straw man is that there are only two options: his way, or doing nothing at all. He says it every time he speaks. “There are those who want to do nothing…” What crap.

There are time-tested and proven methods of getting ourselves out of a bad economy. What these methods boil down to is simply this: put more money in the hands of the people who earn the money.

Government has no money of it’s own. One hundred percent of the revenue government uses comes from taxpayers. This is why the stimulus package, and the subsequent stimulus packages (look for Porkulus III: Revenge Of The Bureaucrat within a few months of Porkulus II), will not work. The premise behind them is that in order to put money into the economy, they first must take money out of the economy. It’s why government attempts to stimulate the economy through direct action, rather than by letting people and the free market decide how to spend their own money, are doomed to failure.

If the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over again while expecting a different result, then it is time to haul the Democrats off to the funny farm. But then, this has never been about stimulating the economy. It has always been about changing the way the citizenry of the United States deals with the Federal Government. This is about making as many people as possible dependent on government largesse. This is about an intellectual elite who feel that you don’t know how to spend the money you earn as well as they do. The Morlocks in D.C. are trying their very best to convince the Eloi of the fifty states to follow blindly and leave the decision making and the serious thinking to the smart ones. In their hearts, they believe that we are drones, toiling to provide them with more money and more power. In return, they give us the Postal Service and promises of paradise on Earth. Well, folks, it’s all a bunch of bull. You can’t immanentize the eschaton, as Eric Voeglin said.

This is about control. Fight the power.

UPDATE: In today’s Washington Post, President Obama has an op-ed defending the stimulus. Over at The Corner, Stephen Spruiell dismantles it with ruthless efficiency.

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Posted by Blaknsam