Five myths about Obama’s stimulus
2. The stimulus was full of waste, pork and fraud.
Most of the Recovery Act consisted of straightforward aid to states and to the vulnerable, infrastructure spending, and tax cuts. Critics may call it “porkulus,” but the stimulus was also the first modern spending bill with no official legislative earmarks, the usual definition of “pork.” And after experts warned that 5 to 7 percent of the money could be lost to fraud, investigators documented only $7.2 million in losses through 2011, about 0.001 percent.
Of course, waste is in the eye of the beholder. But it’s telling that most Republican examples of stimulus boondoggles were either removed from the bill (sod on the Mall, smoking cessation), never in the package (mob museums, levitating trains to Disneyland) or wild distortions (The new Department of Homeland Security headquarters is not “government furniture”).
Yes, there was
Solyndra, but its $535 million default represented only about 1 percent of the Recovery Act’s clean-energy loan portfolio, and independent reviewers have found that the overall portfolio is in fine shape. And Republican investigators have found no evidence that cronyism drove the Solyndra loan.
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Really, republicans hated Obama because he was a good president.