Fausta's Blog

Painting a street green hasn’t stimulated one new job

Nine months after Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus package, there is little tangible to show for one of its biggest single areas of investment, the $25 billion energy-efficiency effort. That points to one of the central tensions of President Obama’s landmark stimulus package: His goal was to inject money quickly into the economy while at the same time laying the groundwork for his broader, transformational agenda on energy, education and health care.

Officials overseeing the energy-efficiency effort want to fundamentally alter the way the country uses energy. They are trying to craft initiatives that will produce real savings to build the case for continued private or public investment. And they are putting safeguards in place to avoid any spending scandals that could tarnish the effort.

All this deliberation comes with a tradeoff: The full force of the spending will likely not be felt until well into next year, potentially undermining the job-creating aim of the stimulus.

It comes down to this:

As of early this month, Indiana had weatherized 82 homes out of its three-year goal of 25,000, and reported zero new jobs from the spending.

Typical government-run process.

And you want them running your healthcare?

Tags: Fausta's blog, stimulus bill

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Democrats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.