The way the Republicans are whining about debt and federal spending that didn't go to the upper 1 percent of wage earners, you would have thought the stimulus money Obama had to spend was a failure:
NY Times: The House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, said, “While Washington keeps spending and piling more debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren, out-of-work families keep asking, ‘where are the jobs?’ ”
Since we already know Republicans don't like teachers or their public schools, nothing could be more wasteful than throwing more money at education that doesn't help charters or voucher schools.
The best symbol of the $787 billion federal stimulus program turns out not to be a construction worker in a hard hat, but rather a classroom teacher saved from a layoff. Of the 640,239 jobs recipients claimed to have created or saved so far, officials said, more than half — 325,000 — were in education. Most were teachers’ jobs that states said were saved when stimulus money averted a need for layoffs.
But what if a Republican stepped forward who had more to say than tired old tantrums about saving the economy and unfairly bailing out an economic collapse they created in the first place:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, whose state has faced perhaps the most severe budget crisis in the nation, said: “Some of our colleagues are saying that it hasn’t done much, or was a waste of money,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said, sharing the stage with Mr. Biden. “Well, I would dispute that.” He said the stimulus had created or saved more than 100,000 jobs in California, the most in the nation, more than half of which — 62,000 — were the jobs of teachers, professors and school administrators.
Mr. Schwarzenegger noted that some people have questioned whether those teachers would actually have been laid off without the stimulus. “No, those teachers would have been gone, if it wouldn’t have been for the federal stimulus money,” he said.
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