Why the stimulus is no stimulus, the recovery no recovery, and why things are getting worse

How could this happen when Washington has thrown trillions of dollars into the pot, including the famous $787 billion in spending that was supposed to yield $1.50 in growth for every dollar spent? For a start, too much of the money went to transfer payments--Medicaid, jobless benefits, and the like--that do nothing for jobs and growth. The spending that creates new jobs is new spending, particularly on infrastructure. It amounts to less than 10 percent of the stimulus package today.

There are many more reasons today to expect the downturn to continue than to expect a turnaround. Consumer spending and residential investment could be even weaker than most estimates, and, as the level of fiscal stimulus begins its decline in the second half of 2010, we may be facing an even more difficult future.

SHOOT: It's not alarmist, it's reality.

clipped from finance.yahoo.com We are now looking at unemployment numbers that undermine any confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. The appropriate metaphor is not the green shoots of new growth. A better image is to look at the true total of jobless people as a prudent navigator looks at an iceberg. What's more, the job losses are now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all employment growth from the previous business cycle. That's bad enough. But here are nine reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5 percent unemployment rate indicates. Six. The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks. This is the longest term since the government started to track these data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (those out of a job for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.