My newest column at American Issues Project is live. This week, I look at the effect the stimulus package has had on the economy, now that it’s had some time to “work”. With all of the hoopla surrounding health care, the stimulus has all but fallen off of the public radar. But it’s clearer than ever that the stimulus package was nothing more than a dismal failure… and Obama wants to pass another one??

One of the main promises Obama made regarding the stimulus package was that it would save or create over one million jobs. While the claim was that the stimulus package would help stem the economic bleeding and help to save or create jobs, there was really nothing of the sort in the actual bill. The stimulus package was filled with Democrat pork projects, very few of which could conceivably help strengthen the economy. The president who promised he wouldn’t sign a bill with a single earmark in it signed a bill that contained over 9,000 earmarks. Cities that received money from the package saw it mostly used for health care and education, rather than infrastructure. And the earmarks were ridiculous. There was $2 billion for child-care subsidies and $400 million for global warming research. There was $650 million for digital TV conversion coupons and $8 billion for renewable energy. The Smithsonian received $150 million and $7 billion to modernize federal buildings. Do any of these sound like job savers? After all, it’s hard to understand how giving $36 billion to expand unemployment benefits, for example, could possibly help the economy, or how any of those other pork projects could help save or create jobs. And they haven’t — the unemployment rate has never grown so quickly since it started being tracked in 1948.

Since the stimulus package’s passing, we’ve lost an average of 16,000 jobs a day, and the unemployment rate has shot up to 9.8%, a 26-year-high. The budget deficit has quadrupled, and our public debt is currently around $11 trillion. And the stimulus package was one of the biggest causes for our current bleak financial situation. Yet Obama keeps trying to act as if it was a success. Just last month, the White House was claiming that the stimulus package saved one million jobs.

Reality, unfortunately, is not as sweet.

That prior claim was made even as the unemployment rate had risen as the year had gone on, and there had been an increase in the number of Americans unemployed of almost half a million. And the first stimulus reports are out, showing that for all of the White House spin, the truth is not quite as sunny as Obama would have you believe.

Be sure to read the whole thing.