States have begun to report the number of jobs created by stimulus funds. So far, teachers are the big winners under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
An Associated Press analysis of preliminary data found:
Teachers appear to have benefited most from the effort to save jobs with the $787 billion recovery package, which sent billions of dollars to states that were on the verge of ordering heavy layoffs in education. The national data on the impact of President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan won’t be available until later this month. But based on preliminary information obtained by The Associated Press from a handful of states, the stimulus spared tens of thousands of teachers from losing their jobs.
Sure, we love our public school teachers. But it will be back to school, or back to wherever they came from, for some congressional Democrats if Americans are not put back to work.
Political analyst Charlie Cook recently wrote:
To be sure, there are plenty of strong arguments to be made that last fall and early this year government officials, including the president, urgently needed to concentrate on stabilizing our nation’s financial system and credit markets. Indeed, President Bush and his economic team and then President Obama and his advisers performed heroically to keep the U.S. and world economies from falling off a cliff and into a second Great Depression. We were mere days -- if not hours -- from plunging into the abyss, most experts agree.
But the American people are in no mood to hand out kudos for the government’s performance. The results of Garin’s poll suggest that the public wants saving and creating jobs to be at the very top of the government’s agenda. Every minute that voters see the president and congressional Democrats wrangling over health care is another minute that voters don’t see them focused on the nation’s 9.8 percent unemployment rate.
Cook gets an “A+” for keeping it real.
