Beacon Street Journal

The new unemployment figures are in, and they don’t look pretty:

Employers cut a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, driving the unemployment rate up to a 26-year high of 9.5 percent, suggesting that the economy’s road to recovery will be bumpy.

Given the dismal unemployment figures, a question arises: for $787 billion, did Americans get their money’s worth for emergency legislation that was supposed to “stimulate” the economy? The answer is no, as most Americans seem somewhat resigned to the fact that a good portion of the stimulus money will be wasted.

As information about the fraud, abuse and waste of the stimulus package starts to become public, those who had argued that a similar dollar amount of tax cuts would have provided more stimulus to the economy rather than a pork-bill authored by radical left-wing Congressional Democrats, are beginning to look prescient.

It should come as no surprise that a bill that was rushed through Congress in the dead of night, with virtually no Republican support, and whose provisions few Congressmen had time to actually read (sounds an awful like the process that produced the leviathan cap and trade bill) would not perform as advertised.

Of course, for the Obama Administration, the unemployment figures are not what’s important. In order to address the mounting evidence that the stimulus bill has been largely ineffectual, the White House has introduced a new metric — as silly and meaningless as it is novel — for measuring the “stimulus” bill’s success: “jobs saved.”

We await the tortured, but nonetheless predictable, explanation from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who can expound on this silver lining behind the economic cloud of the new and distressing unemployment figures.