Americans don’t believe in the stimulus. Seventy four percent of Americans believe the Obama stimulus either damaged the economy or had no effect, according to a CBS poll.  Additionally, the Wall Street Journal reported the majority of people disagree with the president’s handling of the economy. Americans are right to reject government spending because much of the money has been squandered on non-shovel ready projects. Additionally, the government isn’t capable of creating new growth, but it merely redistributes wealth as it wishes, reducing the multiplier effect within communities.

Why do 74 percent of people believe the stimulus damaged the economy?  The list of scandalous taxpayer funded projects is remarkably long. My favorite is the $71,000 used by Wake Forest researchers to study the effect of cocaine on monkeys, although the $89,298 allocated to replace new sidewalks with newer sidewalks in Oklahoma takes a close second.

[media-credit id=20122 align=”alignleft” width=”250″][/media-credit]At least $5 million of the $28 billion allocated to states for infrastructure has been spent on signs praising the recovery act. Is this not the most wasteful use of our money you’ve ever heard of? I can’t wait for government-run health care to take full effect! Conservatives are critical of the Obama stimulus because they know it wouldn’t work. History shows a variety of examples that indicate this. During the Great Depression, regardless of all the spending by FDR, unemployment remained above 20 percent until after WWII.  After Japan’s 1990s recession, it passed 10 stimulus packages, which ran up the largest debt of any industrialized country while its economy remained stagnant.

Statists like Obama are reluctant to try anything outside of their ideology. Instead of admitting failure, they insist failure is due to a particular leader’s inability to implement governmental coercion correctly. The next big government candidate for poor implementation will blame Obama.

Government cannot create purchasing power.  It borrows money and redistributes it, decreasing domestic capital for investment or running up deficits if it borrows from foreigners.  Additionally, the multiplier effect is reduced.  If a family has a savings of $25,000, and puts it in a CD, a bank can lend it on interest, creating new money and circulating jobs and growth within a town. If the family invests in a $25,000 government bond, it is used for the stimulus. These jobs and subsequent spending are merely relocated to other parts of the country and less is created in aggregate.

President Obama’s “transformational change” is a destructive force to what remained of the American free market system.  He and his cohorts in Hollywood, the media and academia insist they can stimulate the American economy if we surrender more and more of our liberty and private property to them as they believe they are wiser than the populous, regardless of the historical and economic evidence presented. The stimulus is a failure, as Conservatives predicted it would be.