Sometimes the only surprising thing is that anyone is surprised.

“Power of Stimulus Slow to Take Hold,” The Washington Post reported on July 8. “Senior administration officials acknowledged that the effects of the stimulus package have been overshadowed by an unexpectedly sharp drop-off in employment since the measure passed in February,” the paper reported.

In fact, the unemployment rate now is almost 20 percent higher than the Obama administration warned it would be if we didn’t pass the stimulus package. But that’s no surprise, since the $787 billion “stimulus” bill was never intended to stimulate job creation.

Consider that the godfather of deficit spending, John Maynard Keynes, supposedly suggested that to fight a recession, “The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up.”

That’s exactly what some of FDR’s Depression-era programs did. There was, for example, the Civilian Conservation Corps. It sent unemployed men into the woods to hack down trees. Well, at least they had jobs. Seventy years on, many of those trees have presumably grown back; maybe we ought to chop them down again?

If the government had wanted to claim that its bill would “create” jobs, it could have spent money quickly on programs to create busy work. That would have been economically incorrect, but would at least have made the bill seem to be doing what administration officials said it was intended to do.

But the “stimulus” bill didn’t pump money out. So far, only about $55 billion of the $787 billion has been spent. In fact, Washington intends to spend more of the “stimulus” money in 2011 than it does this year. So much for the argument that Congress passed the bill -- in a big hurry, we should remember -- to deal with a national crisis.

What lawmakers did aim to do was promote a bunch of programs they’d never been able to fund before. That’s why the bill contained more than $100 billion in new spending on education, for example. That money won’t do anything to create jobs this year, but it’ll fund bureaucrats and union grandees for years to come.

Here’s a real life example of “stimulus” money at work. On June 29, the Falls Church, Va. city council voted to ask the federal Energy Department for $25 million in stimulus funds. The goal, in the words of one supporter, is to turn the tiny city (just across the river from Washington) into a “green learning laboratory.”

So what’s the plan? A windmill atop city hall? Replacing the unconstitutional traffic cameras that loom over city intersections with actual human police officers? Well, we haven’t actually gotten to the planning stages yet. Continued...