The 18 million Dollar Website We Bought- and more

From Townhall comes this assessment of where we are and how we got there:

Back in February, when the Obama economic team did the full-court press for why we had to have the stimulus now, they said without the "stimulus" bill, unemployment might climb as high at 9%, and with the stimulus in place, unemployment would top out at 8.5%. Well, the Democrats got their stimulus, and the unemployment number sailed way past their dire prediction of 9%.

Remember when Barack Obama told Americans that Joe Biden would keep track of every dime of the stimulus? Remember when ol' Joe himself appeared on television and announced the new website to help him account for the money, if he just knew what the "numbers" of the website address were to give to people? It turns out the one place that is going to see a major influx of stimulus money is Joe Biden's stimulus tracking website. It is currently dysfunctional, and is slated to get an $18 million dollar taxpayer-paid for makeover. In case you aren't in the website design field, let me tell you. $18 million dollars can not only build you a top notch website, it can build you about 20 top notch websites.

In Ghana, Obama defended his stimulus plan, and make no mistake, this is his albatross, by saying, "It has already extended unemployment insurance and health insurance to those who have lost their jobs in this recession." The problem is, that's not what the stimulus was intended to do. It was all about job creation - shovel-ready work projects. Extending the welfare safety net isn't economic stimulus. It's welfare extension.

As Lawrence Kudlow notes over at National Review's The Corner,

Here’s the clincher: Year-to-date, Dow Jones stocks are off 7 percent, while China stocks are up 71 percent. The world index is up 4 percent. Emerging markets are up 25 percent. They’re all beating us. None of this is good.

We’re going the wrong way. That’s why stock markets are not voting for the United States anymore.

The stimulus is widely regarded to be a bust, not a boon to economic recovery. And that's without all the money even being spent yet. It is so much a bust that there are Democratic rumblings amongst administration officials and Congress to double down on the mistake and spend their way further into another stimulus bill, something that even President Obama is unwilling to do. Even Joe Biden tried to spin the ineffectiveness of the first stimulus by admitting they, the administration, misread the economy.

Patterson has a question we should be asking as well.