We're Your Stimulus Dollars and We're Here to Help?

Or maybe not.

From an AP article (not an exactly a bastion of conservative thought):

Ten months into President Obama's first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.

Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn't matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama's argument that more road money would address an "urgent need to accelerate job growth."

.......Even within the construction industry, which stood to benefit most from transportation money, the AP's analysis found there was nearly no connection between stimulus money and the number of construction workers hired or fired since Congress passed the recovery program.

......"As a policy tool for creating jobs, this doesn't seem to have much bite," said Emory University economist Thomas Smith, who supported the stimulus and reviewed AP's analysis. "In terms of creating jobs, it doesn't seem like it's created very many. It may well be employing lots of people but those two things are very different."

When you read an article like this and realize that, despite the very simple and obvious fact that more government has not, is not, and never will be the answer, we are taxing, spending, and bureaucratizing (real word?) our way into complete and total ruin, it's hard not to despair.