According to Veronique de Rugy at The Corner unemployment was not on the radar screen of liberal politicians when they passed the massive Stimulus bill last January 2009. If the odor emanating from the data is any indication, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid were operating a massive pork operation resembling a modern day swine farm back in the glory days of early 2009 when President Barrack Obama could do no wrong. As we suspected, none of the liberal pols were worried about unemployment:
[Re: Stimulus] Unemployment isn’t a factor, but politics is. Your stimulus dollars at work.
First: The idea behind the $787 billion stimulus bill is that, if the government spends money where it is the most needed, it will create jobs and trigger economic growth. Hence, we should expect the government to invest more money in districts with higher unemployment rates.
Controlling for the percentage of the district employed in the construction industry, a proxy for the vulnerability to recession of a district, I find no statistical correlation for all relevant unemployment indicators and the allocation of funds. This suggests that unemployment is not the factor leading the awards. Also, I found no correlation between other economic indicators, such as income, and stimulus funding.
Second: On average, Democratic districts received one-and-a-half times as many awards as Republican ones. Democratic districts also received two-and-a-half times more stimulus dollars than Republican districts ($122,127,186,509 vs. $46,139,592,268). Republican districts also received smaller awards on average. (The average dollars awarded per Republican district is $260,675,663, while the average dollars awarded per Democratic district is $471,533,539.)
What makes this data analysis interesting today is that it arrives with the just released ADP jobs data, which not surprisingly, showed another increase in private sector unemployment when the expectations managers were forecasting better news:
ADP’s employment report came out showing just a 23,000 decline in private employment during March, which looks like a substantial miss vs. the positive 35,000 gain expected by consensus according to Factset.
All of which raises the question why President Obama chose today to announce his bogus off shore drilling policy. Unemployment is not recovering and the President is failing to deliver the number one metric that defines political viability for a President during a recession: job creation. Voters are getting wiser by the day that this President cares nothing about jobs, hasn’t a clue as to how to create them and is throwing any and every policy concept at the wall to see what sticks…as long as it conforms to his ideology . Welcome to the Rudderless Society.
HT: Allahpundit
