Um, Selena?

You really need to check your sources better.

In her column this weekend about how many Iowa Democrats are "disgruntled" with President Obama and the direction the nation is taking.

Which, itself, is not the issue.  Heck, I'm disgruntled with Obama - though not disgruntled enough to vote for the empty suit who's got millions off shore in Switzerland and the Caymans.

But let's not go there.  Let's get back to the column.  In it, Selena Zito writes about a disgruntled small business owner:

Winery owner John Guinan said he “wanted to put a sign outside that said, ‘I can’t wait to vote,’ but I thought it was a bit over the top.”

Five years ago, Guinan and his wife, Rose, transformed an old Ford assembly plant-turned-auto-dealership into the enchanting Santa Maria Vineyard & Winery, with stone courtyards and a restaurant offering the feel of Tuscany. Guinan said it’s “the third largest winery in the state.”

He admitted his passion to vote for Mitt Romney didn’t exist until Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate: “Right then and there, he had my vote. Ryan is very bright, very capable, and understands the serious problems facing the finances of our country.”

The small businessman, who employs more than 70 in the town of Carroll, found Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment “galling, but not surprising. It is reflective of the concern I had about him on the front end,” referring to the value that Obama puts on government over individuals. [Emphasis added.]

God, I really hate to do this.

According to propublica.org, Carroll County, Iowa received about $22 million in stimulus funding of which $4.8 million went in via the Small Business Administration.

According to this page at propublica.org, the Santa Maria Vineyard & Winery received a guaranteed loan from the Small Business Administration of $1,000,000.  This was the reason given:

TO AID SMALL BUSINESSES WHICH ARE UNABLE TO OBTAIN FINANCING IN THE PRIVATE CREDIT MARKETPLACE

The page dates this at April 28, 2009.

According to this page, however, the numbers are different - only $31,000.  Perhaps Mr Guinan only had access to up to a million in guaranteed loans but only took advantage of $31,000.  I don't know either way.

Doesn't matter much to my argument, of course.  He's offended at the "you didn't build that comment" even though, according to propublica, his own history supports exactly what offends him.  However successful his winery is, he didn't build it himself!  He got some help from the guv'ment.

Selena should have checked this.  But she didn't.  Took only me a few minutes to find it.  Either she should have known and she didn't or she knew and didn't include it in the piece.

So which is it, Selena, incompetence or dishonesty?

Or is the data at propublica.org wrong?

A Republican Called For A Stimulus Plan

An astute reader emailed this link in a day or so ago.  Written in late 2008, it's from the website of some left-leaning periodical called The National Review and it was written by some former Republican Governor of Massachusetts named Romney.

Here's the opening:

What is Washington waiting for? The inauguration is less than five weeks away: At the rate we’ve been going, another 500,000 jobs will be lost by then. The downward spiral is deepening and accelerating: Congress and the president must act now.

American families have lost about $11 trillion in net worth as securities and home values have plummeted. This translates into about $400 billion less annual consumer spending, net of government safety-net funding. Exports won’t grow to make this up, as the dollar has strengthened with investors worldwide clamoring for its relative security. Investments won’t make up the gap either, as bank loans and secondary-market financing have shrunk and as fresh equity is virtually non-existent.

So this is surely the time for economic stimulus.

This is the same Mitt Romney who said this recently:

At a campaign event in New Hampshire on Friday, Mitt Romney once again sharply condemned the stimulus package passed during the president's first month in office, calling it "the largest one-time careless expenditure of government money in American history."

I know what you're saying (I do, really - I'm clairvoyant that way). You're saying that maybe the stimulus package Romney begged for in 2008 is fundamentally different from the one passed in 2009.

Let's see what he called for.  Mitt wrote:

The first is that tax cuts are part of the solution.

Hey, did you know that there were almost $300 billion in tax incentives attached to the ARRA?

Mitt also wrote:

On the spending front, infrastructure projects should be a high priority.

There was $29 billion in infrastructure funding.

We could do this all day, I guess.  Mitt called for an economic stimulus package, one was passed, and now that it's politically expedient, he's against it.

Toomey Fact-Checked On The Stimulus

But not by me.

This has been bouncing around various places for a while. There are two separate frames here, one general and one specific. Both are from Factcheck.org. First the general. Regarding the "Stimulus Package" and the GOP's response to it. Here's the set-up:

The economic stimulus package is a favorite target of Republican candidates and groups, but more than a few ads falsely claim it did not create or save any jobs.

And here's their analysis:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, more commonly known as the stimulus bill, has been featured in more than 130 TV ads this year, according to a database maintained by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. In many of those ads, Republicans claim the bill has "failed" (a matter of opinion) or state (correctly) that unemployment has gone up since President Barack Obama signed the bill into law on Feb. 17, 2009. The national unemployment rate was 8.2 percent in February 2009, and it now stands at 9.6 percent, having peaked at 10.1 percent in October 2009.

But it’s just false to say that the stimulus created "no jobs" or "failed to save and create jobs" or "has done nothing to reduce unemployment" – or similar claims that the stimulus did not produce any jobs.

As we have written before, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report in August that said the stimulus bill has "[l]owered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points" and "[i]ncreased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million."

Simply put, more people would be unemployed if not for the stimulus bill. The exact number of jobs created and saved is difficult to estimate, but nonpartisan economists say there’s no doubt that the number is positive.

I know I've written about this before, too.

So whenever we hear some otherwise well meaning conservative state that the stimulus "failed to create jobs", we know that they're just wrong.

Now the specific. Last August, Factcheck.org fact-checked Toomey on this very issue. Take a look:

The ad, which was released Aug. 10, criticizes Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak for a number of his votes that prove, the ad claims, "Washington is failing." It says: "Bailouts, takeovers, a stimulus that gave us record debt without creating jobs. Congressman Joe Sestak voted for all of it." Sestak did vote for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — more commonly known as the stimulus bill — which at first was expected to cost $787 billion, but now has risen to an estimated $862 billion. But it is wrong to say it "gave us record debt without creating jobs."

Let’s take the easy one first: jobs. There has been some debate over the exact number of jobs that have been created by the stimulus bill, as we have noted in the past, but there is no question that it has created and saved jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that through March 2010, the stimulus bill was responsible for the employment of between 1.2 million and 2.8 million people. The CBO said the stimulus had lowered the national unemployment rate "by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.5 percentage points."

And then they summarize:

Toomey would be on safe ground if he said the stimulus added to the debt without creating enough jobs — those would be his opinions, and defensible ones at that. But he can’t say it didn’t create any jobs and caused a record debt. [emphasis added.]

Pat Toomey: wrong about the stimulus package. Thus spake factcheck.org.

Filling In A Few Blanks

Every now and then the editorial pages at the Tribune-Review and the Post-Gazette cover the same issue and it's child's play to guess which side of which issue each will support.

Today is no exception.

The Trib say: North Shore connector - bad, Coburn-McCain report - good.

The P-G? As you might expect, sees things differently.

Since the overlap begins with the Coburn McCain report, we'll start there.

The Trib:

Laurel: To Tom Coburn and John McCain. The Republican U.S. senators, of Oklahoma and Arizona, respectively, list Pittsburgh's North Shore Connector as the nation's third-worst waste of federal "stimulus" money. And what a waste it is. Its benefits were oversold. It's dramatically over budget. And it's a monument to both the state in ineptness and the ineptness of the state. It is "waste" incarnate.

And the P-G:

Don't mistake the report this week by Republican Sens. John McCain and Tom Coburn for an economic analysis of the federal stimulus. "Summertime Blues" is a political stunt, designed to make the stimulus sound foolhardy by belittling and mischaracterizing projects it has funded.

As usual in supporting it's position, the Trib relies on some Scaife-funded think tank without ever declaring his support for that think tank. In this case the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy is referenced twice. You get what you pay for, I guess.

In it's defense of the Stimulus bill, the P-G points out:

It begins with an oversimplification, long stated by opponents of the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, that "Eighteen months since the law's passage, millions of jobs are still gone and the economy is as uncertain as ever."

That conclusion ignores countervailing findings, such as those issued last week -- by a former McCain adviser who is chief economist for Moody's investment service as well as Princeton economist Alan Blinder -- which said the stimulus program and the bank bailout likely averted a depression.

In doing so, they left something out.

The CBO (that's the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, for you newbies) has declared that the stimulus package:

• Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.2 percent,
• Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.5 percentage points,
• Increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 2.8 million, and
• Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

So when Coburn and McCain write:

When Congress passed the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, otherwise known as the stimulus bill, it passed with assurances that it would stem the loss of American jobs and keep the economy from floundering. As most can see, it hasn’t.

Eighteen months since the law’s passage, millions of jobs are still gone and the economy is as uncertain as ever. The only thing getting a boost is our national debt – the stimulus has helped push it 23 percent higher, to $13.2 trillion, a new record.

You know they're just spinning. And that everything that follows is just a part of the spin. The facts may be true, but as the frame is skewed, so is the conclusion.

As the P-G points out:

No one is suggesting that every dollar of stimulus money has been spent wisely, but this report starts with a weak hypothesis supported by exaggeration. There ain't no cure for this "Summertime Blues."

As it's Friday and Fridays should be fun, here's some Eddie Cochran:


UPDATED to include the frickin link to the CBO report

And Now Some Animation

Wanna see more Smigly? Go see my friend Al.