Reid: "Stimulus is working, on schedule, under budget, & free of fraud"

The Stimulus Bill was passed at the beginning of 2009 to help the United States recover, according to President Obama.  According to the President, the $787,000,000,000 was worth it, even if we didn't have any way to pay for it, because it would be so effective and so well-run.  Not only that, but he promised unemployment would not rise above 8%.

Well, in the over year-and-a-half since the Stimulus Bill was passed, it has widely been regarded as a failure.  Reports of billions of dollars of pork come out weekly, and unemployment has been over 8% for a year and a half, hovering at times over 10%.  Even the President recently said that there was "no such thing" as a "shovel-ready project," which he constantly touted.

Apparently nobody told Harry Reid.  Reid, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, is in the race of his life in Nevada against his Republican rival Sharron Angle.  At a time where the most recent polls have shown Angle with a slight edge, Reid is desperately trying to paint her as "out of touch," dangerous, and "an extremist."  However, the person who is clearly out of touch is Harry Reid himself, who recently posted an article on his campaign site entitled, "Stimulus is working, on schedule, under budget, & free of fraud."

You read that right.  The Stimulus, which I will remind you cost nearly 1 Trillion Dollars, has billions of dollars of pork in it, and did not stop unemployment from ballooning to over 10%, is "working, on schedule, under budget, & free of fraud."

But that's not all.  Aside from the clearly ludicrous headline, the posted article goes further.  In one section, the article reads:

Before the stimulus passed, experts predicted the government would lose 5% to 7% of it to fraud; today, out of over 190,000 contracts, grants and loans, less than 0.2% are under investigation.

First, obviously .2% is not "free of fraud" as the headline lied.  Secondly, .2% of 787 Billion Dollars is $1,574,000,000, or 1.6 Billion.  I'm sure that I do not need to say this, but over one-and-a-half billion dollars of fraud is hardly "free of fraud."

Another reason why there is so "little" fraud according to the article: well, everything is just so "newfangled" that criminals cannot figure it out.  The article also applauds the fact that "$551 billion" was spent so quickly.  Seriously, if the vast majority of the spending is done and this is all we have to show for it, I wouldn't be proud of it.  I would reject it.

And I do.

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