Americans are restless over pace of stimulus spending

Summertime, and the living is not easy — for millions of Americans who are still being tossed around by the economic storm that continues to pound the United States. It won’t be long before the unemployment rate hits a shocking 10 percent, at which time President Barack Obama will no longer be able to put a positive spin on the impact of the $787 billion economic stimulus passed by Congress and signed by him in February.

Indeed, Obama sought to lower expectations during a news conference Tuesday in the White House.

“We’ve got to get our Recovery Act money out faster,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure that the programs that we put in place are working the way they’re supposed to.”

Well, the construction season is upon us, and the administration now must deliver on the president’s promise to put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work. Indeed, Obama has said that 600,000 jobs will have been created through the Recovery Act by the end of the summer.

But whether that target can be met is anybody’s guess. The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of spending between February and April shows a mere $19 billion of the $787 billion being handed out. However, the administration insists a better gauge is the amount of money that has been obligated: $112 billion that should create more than 150,000 jobs throughout the country.

Nonetheless, the public’s initial enthusiasm about the stimulus package has been replaced by impatience and even dissatisfaction with the way the administration is handling the economy.

President Obama acknowledged during the news conference that he understands the public’s anxiety.

“People are going through a very tough time right now,” he said. “And I don’t expect them to be satisfied.”

Economic recession

To be sure, no one could have predicted the depth of the economic recession that began last year before Obama took office, but when he made the stimulus package his first order of business, the country breathed a sigh of relief. There were pronouncements from the White House of how the money would be spent — shovel-ready projects were the priority — and warnings to states that if they did not put the dollars to work as quickly as possible they would lose the allocations.

But now, with the unemployment rate rising and Republicans in Congress already declaring the stimulus program a failure, President Obama needs to put on a hard hat, if he must, and travel around the country to highlight the stimulus money at work.

He is correct in saying that had it not been for the Recovery Act, thousands of school teachers would have lost their jobs and huge numbers of police officers would have been laid off.

Obama also deserves praise for stepping in and permitting states that are imploding economically to use some of the stimulus money to fill gaps in their budgets.

Ohio, for example, was given the green light to use $6 billion to pay for some services. Even so, the state is still facing a $3 billion-plus budget shortfall that Gov. Ted Strickland and the Republicans and Democrats in the General Assembly must deal with next week.

But the challenge to the White House is clear: Get the money out and eliminate the red tape that is keeping projects on the shelf.

To be sure, the federal government must guard against waste, theft and fraud, but there has to be a better way of doing things.

Federal and state bureaucracies must fight the urge to say no.