Your Stimulus $$ at Work, Vacations for Teachers

DEKALB GA: Georgia teachers this week are staying at the posh Renaissance Hollywood Hotel and Spa for an educator’s conference. Those in attendance from the Dekalb school district include 39 principals, 32 assistant principals, 45 teachers, 50 reading and math coaches, and 20 central office staff. Remember that the Dekalb contingent is just a small part of the national conference attendees. Georgia school district tax payers don’t have to worry though– they are off the hook. This trip is being paid for by Obama stimulus funds.

Stimulus money from Washington is often discussed in terms of “shovel ready,” designated for construction projects that are supposed to create jobs for unemployed Americans.

But the DeKalb County School System has decided to use stimulus money to attend a four-day conference sponsored by America’s Choice, which a schools spokesman calls “a great thing.”…

[Schools spokesman Dale] Davis said the school system will spend $91,500 for conference registrations and another $291,400 for hotels, flights, meals and incidentals. That’s a total of $382,900 in federal tax money. In an email, Davis wrote, “I am happy that you are expressing interesting in this training opportunity for our employees. We are focused on student improvement. America’s Choice is in partnership with the district to help improve the academic success in 40 of our lowest performing schools.” Atlanta WSBRadio

So the school district couldn’t fit them into a gym for an assembly? This is the type of fraud you can expect when you give Congress a credit card with no spending limits. Oh wait… Congress does have a spending limit: $12.394 trillion. But they decided it wasn’t high enough and just gave themselves a $1.9 trillion credit line increase, bringing their limit to $14.3 trillion.

Congress needs to take your money so they can give to folks that will vote for them, and that certainly includes teachers. When they run out of your money, they’ll spend your children’s money, and then your grandchildren’s, all in order to pay back those who got them elected, and you are letting them do it.

Unions contributed approximately $68 million to Democrats during the 2008 election, as opposed to $6.5 million to Republicans, a ten-fold increase.

Does it strike you strange that public employees should even be allowed to have unions? Ronald Reagan broke the back of the striking air traffic controllers when they threatened the nation’s transportation grid. Public employees’ jobs are entirely paid for by taxing the private sector. Their union lobbyists are now threatening the integrity of our electoral process.

So let’s get this straight: public employees get all of their income from taxing the private sector. Using our tax money, they hire lobbyists to get even more tax money, and we are letting them get away with it.

According to 2009 Department of Labor statistics there was a total of 15.3 million labor union members in 2009. Of those union members, 52% work in the public sector. Of all workers in the US only 7.2% of the private sector are unionized, as opposed to 38.1% of public sector employees. The largest union? School teachers. The 2nd largest? SEIU, with the largest number of their members working for the government.

After working so hard and spending so much to elect a democratic administration, the teachers union figure they deserve some R & R. $383,000 is just a small payback for the millions they spent electing their representatives.

While the private sector is limping along, and while unemployment exceeds 10%, hard-earned tax dollars are being sucked out of the private marketplace where they could create jobs. No worries though for public workers, they are experiencing a boom:

For most Americans, the Great Recession has been an occasion to hold on for dear life. For public employees, it’s been an occasion to let the good times roll.   [Emphasis added.]

The percentage of federal civil servants making more than $100,000 a year jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent during the first year and a half of the recession, according to USA Today. At the beginning of the downturn, the Transportation Department had one person making $170,000 or more a year; now it has 1,690 making that.

The New York Times reports that state and local governments have added a net 110,000 jobs since the beginning of the recession, while the private sector has lost 6.9 million. Real Clear Politics

We are sure the teachers had a great time at the Renaissance Hotel and Spa, and they insist it was worth it. However, long after the hot tubs have cooled and the bubbly has fizzled, our children and grandchildren will be struggling to pay off the bill.

According to Martin Crutsinger and Daniel Wagner of the AP:

The deficit for the 2009 budget year, which ended on Sept. 30, set an all-time record in dollar terms of $1.42 trillion. That was $958 billion above the 2008 deficit, the previous record holder. [Emphasis added]

October was the 13th straight month to show a monthly deficit — another record. It was the fifth-largest monthly deficit ever.  Martin Crutsinger and Daniel Wagner, Newser.com

The 2008 deficit, the previous record holder: $462 billion. The 2009 deficit: $1.42 trillion, three times larger than the largest deficit on record. And to think some in Congress are calling for Stimulus II.

You can see the effect on the National Debt at our running counter on the right. We hope US citizens are saving money to pay all this back. Either that or voters might want to start thinking about replacing this administration.

Sometime later on Friday the “revised” numbers were posted. That was when we needed the oxygen. Not in our wildest dreams did we think the WH would “revise” the claim upwards to 640,000, dropping the percentage of bogus jobs from 16.7% to .8%. Pretty audacious.

Now we now why Gibbs downplayed the 5000 margin of error, he knew last week how they were going to discredit it– just inflate the denominator. Let’s forget questions about their original numbers and lets use some common sense and look at their new “numbers.”

640,329 jobs “created/saved” according to the latest reporting, at a cost of $159 billion, equalling $248,309 per job (using their numbers). And this they are proud of?

Already news outlets are digging into these numbers and finding all sorts of phony data. Fact is that there is no way to quantify “saved” jobs. And the jobs being created are government temporary jobs, at taxpayer expense. Not private sector employment. How about some real numbers from today’s report from the US Department of Labor instead? (We have archived the report here.)

At least we can be grateful for HR 3220. Free home oxygen has arrived in the nick of time.

AP Reporters Brett Blackledge and Matt Apuzzo report that a sampling of less than 9,000 of these jobs show that half of those examined or nearly 5,000 jobs were simply not created. It appears that ACORN alumni are working in the polling department at the White House:

Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

• Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Florida day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.

• A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times. Associated Press

The WH agreed with the AP that the numbers are phony, but they regard the fakery as accounting errors. The WH vowed to correct the numbers in a new report due tomorrow. The 1 in 6 bogus jobs found in the sampling is an error rate too large for simple statistical inaccuracy, hence it becomes fodder for NIP economists.

Unemployment in now is averaging 9.5% with 17 states above the average, including Michigan at 15.3%. We thought the “emergency” stimulus bill was to create millions of jobs. Apparently the ACORN counters were having trouble even coming up with 30,000 jobs created so they employed their get-out-the vote tactics. We wonder how many jobs they reported being created here at the NIP?

*Actually the NIP is doing some prevaricating here. As of Oct 21st only 15% of the $787 billion has been spent. That lowers the money spent per job to $3,935,000. Still, nice work if you can get it.