It’s never enough. American taxpayers have given billions and billions and billions of dollars to the chief editor of social justice. But it’s never, ever enough.
The latest spasm of urban violence, looting and recriminations in Baltimore prompted President Obama to pull out his tattered Blame the Heartless, Miserly Republicans card Tuesday. After forgoing his requisite wrist slap on toilet paper and the Oreo-stealing “protesters” who are burning Charm City to the ground (he hastily changed that to “criminals and thugs” mid-word), the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner went about his usual business: lecturing his political opponents and complaining that America hasn’t given him enough money to make the “massive investments” he needs to “make a difference now.”
If we are “serious” about preventing more riots, the president said, “the rest of us” (translation: all of us stingy conservatives) must make sure that we “provide early childhood education” and “invest” so that inner-city youth “get the training they need to find jobs.”
The Potomac narcissist has been sucking up that “I have a lot of plans that could make a difference right now.” Me, me, me! His long list of supposedly underfunded remedies that he can’t get through Congress includes “school reform,” “job training,” and “some infrastructure investment” to “attract new businesses.”
I agree with POTUS: it can spread manure thicker than a John Deere manure spreader.
Let’s talk about “huge investments”, shall we?
In 2009, Obama and the Democrats pushed an $840 billion federal stimulus package through Capitol Hill under the pretense of immediate job creation and economic recovery. An estimated $64 billion went to public school districts; another nearly $50 billion was earmarked for other education spending. This included $13 billion for low-income public school children; $4.1 billion for Head Start and child care services; $650 million for educational technology; $200 million for working college students; and $70 million for homeless children.
How it all works: Last week, economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve surveyed more than 6,700 stimulus recipients and concluded that for every $1 million in stimulus money given to a district, a paltry 1.5 jobs were created. “Moreover, all of this growth came in the form of nonteaching staff,” the report found, and “the job effect was also statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
More than three-quarters of the jobs “created or saved” in the first year of the stimulus were government jobs, while about 1 million private-sector jobs were saved or destroyed, according to Ohio State University. President Obama later admitted that “there’s no such thing” as “projects ready to go.” But there were plenty of beneficiaries ready to go, from green-energy billionaires to union bosses and Democratic campaign fundraisers. About $230 billion in stimulus funds were set aside for infrastructure projects, but less than a year later, Obama was asking again for another $50 billion to plug the infrastructure black hole.
In 2010, President Obama signed the Edujobs Act, a $26 billion political wealth redistribution program that was supposed to pay back Big Labor for financing Democratic congressional campaigns. A year later, several spent the money to fill budget shortfalls instead of hiring teachers. Other recipients received billions despite having full education payrolls and not knowing what to do with the huge bucks.
In 2012, with bipartisan support, Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act “to encourage startups and support small businesses across our nation.”
In July 2014, Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, with bipartisan support, to “help job seekers access employment, education, training, and support services to succeed in the labor market and match employers with the skilled workers they need to compete in the global economy.” (Not to mention that the GAO review of the existing 47 job training programs run by nine different agencies across the federal government “generally found that the effects of participation were not consistent across programs, with only a few showing positive effects that tended to be small, inconsistent, or limited to short-term effects.”)
In December 2014, the White House unveiled nearly $1 billion in modern “investments” to “expand access to high-quality early childhood education for every child in America” from “birth and continuing through age 5.”
That’s on top of a $6 billion federally funded national service and education initiative known as the SERVE America Act, which was passed less than a month after the nearly $1 trillion stimulus with the lend a hand of a majority of Big Government senators. The SERVE America Act included $1.1 billion to boost investments in national service opportunities; $97 million for Learn and Serve America youth engagement zones; and nearly $400 million for the Social Innovation Fund and the Volunteer Generation Fund.
The “social innovation” fund was intended to “create new knowledge about solving social problems in the areas of economic opportunity, youth development, and school support and healthy futures, and to improve our nation’s problem-solving infrastructure in low-income communities.” The biggest beneficiaries? Obama’s progressive cronies.
Apparently, the well-funded “social innovators” have not yet reached the neighborhoods in Baltimore where looting is prone. But that is not Obama’s ideologically bankrupt fault. It is our fault.
