The Sign You Won't See Here....

By now, pretty much everybody knows that President Obama’s economic stimulus program, more formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, has turned out to be an extremely expensive failure.

Instead of creating or saving millions of jobs, this massive economic stimulus program really represented the federal government’s wasteful spending at its worse, sending millions upon millions of dollars to no sustainable or productive end.

Our example today drives that point home and provides an almost perfect metaphor for the impotence of President Obama’s signature economic achievement. NBC’s Bay Area Investigative Unit reports:

The NBC Investigative Unit has raised questions about two grants totaling nearly $1.5 million dollars distributed to the University of California San Francisco. The money was part of the federal stimulus program and went to studies into the erectile dysfunction of overweight middle aged men and the accurate reporting of someone’s sexual history.

This is part of our ongoing series of investigations by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit into who got federal stimulus dollars, and why some projects did not break ground more than two years after receiving the grant.

We really can’t make this stuff up. Here’s the $726,805 grant the government issued for the research into the erectile dysfunction of overweight middle-age men, which created 1.61 jobs according to the government’s estimates and which, apparently, is now more than 50% completed.

As for the study into how to improve the surveys in which data about individual sexual histories are collected, here’s the $1,260,717 grant, which as of May 15, 2012 is reported by the federal government to have resulted in the creation of 0.78 jobs, which is down from the 0.85 jobs that the NBC Bay Area Investigative Team reported just a day earlier.

Yes, you read that right – this stimulus spending is becoming less and less stimulating! And even the people responsible for managing the federal government’s massive economic stimulus program don’t believe that this spending is creating or saving jobs, aka “stimulating the economy”, like it was supposed to do.

Featured Image: Photo via the Federal Road Administration