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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (38909)	11/23/2009 8:32:55 AM
From: sandintoes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Darn I hate that I missed it. It's not very often that they give it to democrats... Just a year ago during the presidential campaign, the prime target of "Saturday Night Live" was then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin who was not only spoofed by Tina Fey, but also featured in a controversial skit where New York Times reporters sought to probe the possibility Palin's husband, Todd, was having sex with the couple's own daughters. That was BEFORE the election, now it is too late!

To: lorne who wrote (38909)	12/3/2009 10:03:40 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

Mistakes in Stimulus Report Under Review DECEMBER 2, 2009, 10:50 P.M. ET. By LOUISE RADNOFSKY WASHINGTON -- The head of the board responsible for tracking the federal stimulus said Wednesday that federal inspectors-general are reviewing the causes of numerous mistakes in an October report that the Obama administration said showed more than 640,000 jobs were created or saved by the program. "I think there's enough embarrassment to go round," said Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Twelve inspectors-general sit on the board. It's "clear that the job could have been done better," he said. The forms filed quarterly by thousands of stimulus grant recipients and released to the public for the first time at the end of October are the basis for the administration's claim that the stimulus package has directly created or saved 640,329 jobs. The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations have found numerous mistakes in the data including recipients reporting that they had saved tens of thousands of jobs which were actually pay raises or part-time student positions. Jobs were also reported from nonexistent Congressional districts. Republicans have used the mistakes as evidence that the $787 billion plan has been a failure. House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said in a statement Wednesday morning that Democrats faced "a serious credibility problem" as they worked on new jobs-creation programs because of their "outrageous claims" about the package. Mr. Devaney said that the recovery board is working on building in technical controls to the reporting process to prevent recipients from making basic data-entry errors when describing their congressional district or which agency had awarded them money, as well as ways for recipients to correct mistakes in their reports before the next quarter. "I don't enjoy sitting here with numbers I know to be wrong for three months," he said, though he added the board is not likely to make immediate updates to the total number of jobs displayed on its website, recovery.gov. The chairman also said that recipients of stimulus money should take some of the blame for filing sloppy reports, or failing to report at all. As many as 10% of recipients are thought to have failed to file forms. Mr. Devaney said he wanted Congress to create civil or criminal penalties for recipients who failed to file reports. "I had presumed that the recipients of these monies needed the monies and would feel an obligation to report on them as accurately as possible," he said. The White House announced Wednesday evening that the Office of Management and Budget would be directing agencies to provide a list of all the recipients who had not submitted reports. "Missing information is unacceptable," said gaffe prone Vice President Joe Biden, in a statement. "Our actions today continue the administration's commitment of going beyond 'business as usual' to develop an unprecedented system of obligating, disbursing, tracking, and reporting on the use of recovery funds." Mr. Biden has previously suggested that the reporting requirements for stimulus money could become permanent standards for how the government does business. Mr. Devaney said that he thought the requirements had been "transformational." "I can't believe that having got a taste, as ugly as it was, of this data that people want to go back to the old way," he said. "We always said the data was going to be bad without being scrubbed for months in the bowels of Washington's basements... The best way to improve it is to show it in its ugliest form." Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@dowjones.com online.wsj.com

To: lorne who wrote (38909)	9/20/2010 12:51:32 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Obama's "Cash for Clunkers" failed Here is a new paper by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi: A key rationale for fiscal stimulus is to boost consumption when aggregate demand is perceived to be inefficiently low. We examine the ability of the government to increase consumption by evaluating the impact of the 2009 "Cash for Clunkers" program on short and medium run auto purchases. Our empirical strategy exploits variation across U.S. cities in ex-ante exposure to the program as measured by the number of "clunkers" in the city as of the summer of 2008. We find that the program induced the purchase of an additional 360,000 cars in July and August of 2009. However, almost all of the additional purchases under the program were pulled forward from the very near future; the effect of the program on auto purchases is almost completely reversed by as early as March 2010 - only seven months after the program ended. The effect of the program on auto purchases was significantly more short-lived than previously suggested. We also find no evidence of an effect on employment, house prices, or household default rates in cities with higher exposure to the program. Ungated versions of the paper are here. marginalrevolution.com