Today, President Obama will be in Northern Indiana, near my hometown. He is visiting Elkhart, home of the RV Hall of Fame and a wrecked recreational vehicle industry.
Will the crowd be “all ears,” or will Obama be questioned appropriately about the promises he made there just weeks after his inauguration?
Elkhart has become a symbol of Obama’s economic policy for many people because of the attention he has paid the town. MSNBC has a regular feature it refers to as “The Elkhart Project” because of the economic promises Obama made there while promoting his economic stimulus package.
Obama was in Elkhart on February 9 when he promised that his stimulus package had “the right size, the right scope, and has the right priorities to create jobs that will jumpstart our economy and transform it for the twenty-first century.” He also promised “nearly 80,000” jobs for Hoosiers — “not just any jobs,” but good infrastructure-building jobs that would be truly stimulative — for example, “jobs repairing our roads and our bridges and our levees; jobs investing in renewable energy to help us move towards energy independence.”
Indiana has lost 24,000 jobs since Obama’s February promises, and unemployment in Elkhart stands at nearly 17 percent. The City of Elkhart has received $14 million in stimulus funds and already spent $4 million of that resurfacing a little-used 6,500-foot airport runway. The project created 100 jobs — 100 temporary jobs, that is. The project is now finished, according to news reports.
Understandably, President Obama has recently backed away from all that “jumpstart” language he was using in February. He was lowering expectations for the stimulus package last month by telling audiences that it “was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall.” He now says that the stimulus was “from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall.” But more federal stimulus spending is going to fill state budget gaps, save bureaucrats’ jobs and fund welfare payments rather than to build roads or levees or create lasting jobs.
In other words, the stimulus package was really a long-term spending bill. That sounds strangely like what Republicans were saying when they voted against it.
As for the suggestion that things would be “much worse” without the stimulus, consider that only $70.2 billion of the stimulus package — less than ten percent of the whole — had been spent as of July 24, according to Recovery.gov. In the context of America’s $14 trillion economy, it’s less a “jumpstart” than it is a “drop in the bucket.”
Hopefully, someone in Elkhart will have the opportunity to ask the key questions.
