By Adam Bitely – Just one year ago, the Obama administration was touting the rollout of the “Summer of Recovery”, a summer long program in 2010 that would end with jobs created from coast to coast.
On a specially designed website for the “Summer of Recovery”, Americans could check out an interactive map that displayed where money would be spent and how many jobs were being created. Using the time-worn argument of “jobs created or saved”, the map displayed wishful figures leading one to believe the program was working. The data at the end of the summer — and now a year later — disproves that the summer of 2010 was the beginning of the long promised recovery.
Instead the “Summer of Recovery” in 2010 might better be viewed as a failure of the “stimulus” promises and what happens when a nation continually engages in deficit-spending, which more resembled the Great Depression of the 1930’s than a private sector economic growth spurt.
At the beginning of the “Summer of Recovery” in June of 2010, the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Just two months later in August, the unemployment had risen to 9.6 percent and remained so through September before eventually increasing even higher. This was hardly the recovery that the administration had been pushing for.
Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson stated at the close of the recovery summer that, “September marks the 17th straight month that unemployment has been at or above 9.4 percent — the longest period of time of sustained unemployment since the Great Depression. The Pelosi-Reid big government ‘stimulus’ programs have failed. They have failed the working families of America miserably while saddling our children and grandchildren with a mountain of debt.”
Not only had the Big Government schemes of orchestrating a recovery through infrastructure project failed, they led to increased job losses and even high unemployment figures. To say the least, the “Summer of Recovery” in 2010 is a time that the Obama administration would like to forget.
When the White House announced the “Recovery Summer” theme in June of 2010, here were the examples of projects that were going to bring the nation back from its high unemployment nightmare:
• “Highway Projects: There will be six times as many highway projects underway in July 2010 as in July 2009 – projects will surge from 1,750 last summer to over 10,000 this summer.
• “Clean and Drinking Water: This summer over 2,800 clean and drinking water projects will be underway versus just over 100 last summer – more than 20 times as many.
• “Home Weatherization: This summer, 82,000 homes will be weatherized versus 3,000 last summer – 27 times as many homes this summer as last.
• “National Parks: This July, nearly 800 projects will be underway at national parks versus just over 100 last July – 8 times as many this summer.”
Knowing that the government blew hundreds of millions — if not billions — of dollars on home weatherization’s and clean drinking water projects, is it any surprise that the economy tanked further that summer?
Even more surprising is that the National Parks Conservation Association is on the air running radio ads featuring Sam Waterston of Law & Order fame begging Americans to put pressure on Congress to increase funding for National Parks. According to the radio ad, National Parks are in grave disrepair and are lacking adequate funding. But wasn’t the “Summer of Recovery” supposed to fix the parks, with nearly 800 projects in July of 2010 alone?
It’s been almost one year since the “Summer of Recovery” began, and the unemployment rate has marginally decreased with a trend line that leads one to speculate that it will only be going back up again. Additionally, our nation’s Gross Domestic Product estimates have been lowered to levels that barely exceed the inflation rate, and housing has slumped back into a double dip depression with new home starts at near historically low levels, home prices continuing to drop precipitously and foreclosures in every neighborhood.
Politicians continue to throw around ideas of targeting government spending on this project or that project, completely ignoring the lessons that should have been learned time and again, which is that any person or group of persons cannot possibly posses the information to fix the economy, let alone an economy that is as complex as the American economy.
Here we are one year later watching the unemployment rate slowly tick back up and we are still wondering: When will the 2010 Summer of Recovery begin?
Adam Bitely is the Editor-in-Chief of NetRightDaily.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @AdamBitely.
