After $862 billion stimulus, Obama is still 9 million jobs short of his target

Remember why Obama passed the stimulus bill? To create jobs!

The Heritage Foundation explains how Obama is 9 million jobs away from his promised target.

Excerpt:

When Obama made his 3.5 million jobs promise, employment stood at about 135.1 million according to the Department of Labor’s most commonly used measure. This establishes the Obama jobs target for December 2010 at 138.6 million. It also establishes a basic trajectory for employment the economy would need to approximate to hit that target.

According to the latest jobs report, total U.S. employment fell to 129.5 million in January, which means the cumulative Obama jobs deficit–the difference between the end target and the current employment level–stands at 9 million.

[…]The theory underlying Obama’s stimulus was that the economy was weak because total demand was too low. The suggested solution is then to increase demand by increasing the budget deficit. This theory of demand manipulation through deficit spending ignores the simplest of realities: Government spending must be financed. So to finance deficit spending, the government must borrow from private markets, thereby reducing private demand by the same amount as deficit spending increases public demand.

Government spending takes money out of the productive private sector, either by taxes or inflation. But it is the private sector, especially small businesses, that creates the most new jobs. The stimulus plan was doomed to failure.

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