So when will that stimulus start taking effect?

Rick Klein of ABC notes that the administration has started to move the goalposts now claiming that we shouldn't expect to see the effects of the stimulus in the summer and fall.

However, that wasn't what they used to be claiming. When it passed they had a much quicker horizon for when we'd see the impact. In fact, earlier they had claimed that we were already seeing the effects.

But top Obama advisers haven’t always been so cautious in predicting how long the stimulus would take to be felt.

Back in February, with Congress moving swiftly to approve President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, White House budget director Peter Orszag said the benefits of the stimulus would “take weeks to months” to be felt.

Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, was even more optimistic: “You'll see the effects begin almost immediately,” Summers told CNN in February.

Just last month, Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden’s top economic adviser, joined administration officials in asserting that the stimulus was already working, despite rising unemployment rates.

....Then there’s the case of the now-famous chart, prepared in January by the Obama transition team to forecast employment rates with and without a stimulus bill in place.

Obama’s economic advisers saw unemployment cresting at just below 8 percent with the stimulus in place; without it, they forecast the national rate topping out around 9 percent.

The stimulus, of course, did pass, though the national unemployment rate is now 9.4 percent. Two weeks ago, President Obama predicted that unemployment will top 10 percent this year.

Here's the graph of what the Obama folk originally predicted and what we're facing now. No wonder they want to move the goalposts and even ABC is catching them on this.

At the time of the debate (in public, but not in Congress which rushed it through with very little substantive study or debate) over the stimulus package many people were warning that the proposed stimulus would do little to fight unemployment any time soon.

Based on a report from the head of the CBO, Bruce Bartlett reminds us of all the reasons why the stimulus was never about fighting unemployment in the near term.

Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf recently presented a report to the International Monetary Fund in which he walked through some of the problems with implementing the stimulus program.

First of all, 60% of the stimulus package was never going to have much of a stimulative effect. These were programs like extending unemployment benefits and tax credits with no incentive effects that may have been justified on the merits, but don't really do anything to increase growth or reduce unemployment.

For a program to be stimulative, it must bring forth economic activity that otherwise would not have taken place. The classic example is public works. When a new road or bridge is built, construction companies have to purchase concrete, steel and other materials that create business for other companies. They also employ workers that otherwise would not be working, paying them wages that they will spend, producing jobs and incomes for other workers.

If this works the way it is supposed to, stimulus spending has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. A Council of Economic Advisers study estimated that government purchases of goods and services raise the gross domestic product by $1.57 for every $1 spent. By contrast, tax credits and income transfers are much less stimulative, raising GDP by considerably less than $1 for every $1 rise in the deficit.

Since 60% of the stimulus package had a multiplier effect of less than one, only 40% of the package went to programs like public works that have a high multiplier. Moreover, the programs with a low multiplier were the fastest ones to implement; those with a high multiplier take much more time to come online. According to Elmendorf, by the end of fiscal year 2009, which ends on Sept. 30, about a third of the least stimulative spending will have been spent vs. only 11% of the highly stimulative spending.

Even at the end of fiscal year 2010, we will have spent only 47% of the highly stimulative spending. By the end of fiscal year 2011, more than a quarter of the stimulative spending will still remain unspent.

The CBO bases this estimate on many years of experience with various types of government programs. Increases in defense spending are the quickest to stimulate because 65% of the money is usually spent in the first year, rising to 88% the second year and 96% in the third. By contrast, only 27% of highway spending is spent the first year, rising to 68% the second year and 84% the third. Spending on water projects is even slower to come online, with only 4% spent the first year, rising to 24% the second year and 54% the third.

The reason is simple. Much of what the Defense Department buys involves things that also have civilian uses. In effect, it is buying off the shelf so spending can be done quickly. But to build a new highway or dam is much more complicated. Plans have to be drawn up, land acquired, environmental impact statements prepared, public comments solicited, political and other objections dealt with, contracts written and put out for bid, etc. This takes years and years.

Remember that the Democrats, holding control of Congress, were the ones to choose Douglas Elmendorf to head the CBO. This is not a right-wing hack. Yet he finds that defense appropriations would have been the fastest way to use stimulus money to alleviate unemployment. But that would have been verboten to a Democratic Congress and president. So we kept hearing about "shovel-ready" projects. But that was just a myth.

Of course, there were a few shovel-ready projects for which all the preliminary work had been done that only needed money to start work. But there were far fewer of these projects than generally believed. Moreover, as Popular Mechanics reported, many of those that were ready to go were those that had been shelved because they were outdated or had other flaws.

Even the simplest public works projects such as road repaving take months to get moving from the time a federal check arrives. And in the short run such small projects have very little stimulative potential because state and local governments will simply use the workers and materials they already have on hand to do the work.

And, as Christina Hoff Sommers writes in her article "No Country for Burly Men", feminist lobbying helped transform the stimulus from being a proposal to target manufacturing jobs to one to also help professions, relatively unhurt by the recession, in which women predominate.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women's groups has made it all but impossible.

After a big push, the feminist activists achieved their goal.

t is now four months since the bill was signed into law. A recent Associated Press story reports: "Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over 'Shovel-ready' Projects." A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services. According to Chris Whately, director of the Council of State Governments, "We all talked about 'shovel-ready' since September and assumed it was a whole lot of paving and building when, in fact, that's not the case." At the same time, the Labor Department's latest (June 5) employment report shows unemployment rates of 8 percent for women and 10.5 percent for men. "Unprecedented" is what Harvard economist Greg Mankiw called the new 2.5 percentage-point gender gap. "It's the highest male-female jobless rate gap in the history of BLS [Labor Department] data back to 1948," said Mark Perry.

There is great room for debate over the effectiveness of government stimulus programs, and over how much impact a focused "shovel-ready" spending program would have achieved by now. What is not debatable is that changes in the American economy and workforce are favoring service sectors where women are abundant and that the current severe contraction is centered on sectors where men, especially working-class men, predominate. That an emergency economic recovery program should be designed with gender in mind is itself remarkable. That, in current circumstances, it should be designed to "skew" employment further towards women is disturbing and ominous.

....Recall that the Obama administration has taken extraordinary steps to insulate itself from the machinations of organized lobbyists, establishing strict limits and procedures for contacts and communications of every sort. Yet its first major policy initiative was transformed by an orchestrated barrage of emails, op-eds, online petitions, open letters, faxes, phone calls, scripted handshakes, and meetings. And the administration went to great lengths to satisfy its petitioners that their proposals had been adopted directly into law. The administration (and Congress) must have been thinking that groups such as NOW and the Feminist Majority were crusading for social justice, when in fact they were lobbying for their share of the action, to the detriment of urgent necessities.

A Washington feminist establishment that celebrates the "happily-ever-after" story of its victory over burly men cannot represent the views and interests of many women. Those men are fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, and friends; if they are in serious trouble, so are the women who care about them and in many cases depend on them. But NOW and its sister organizations see the world differently. They see the workplace as a battlefront in a zero-sum struggle between men and women, where it is their job to side with women. Unless the Obama administration and Congress find the temerity to distance themselves from the new feminist lobby, the "man-cession" will deepen and further mischief will ensue.

So don't be surprised that a stimulus plan that always had little to do with providing jobs where they were most needed is now not providing those jobs. Just today we've heard that June unemployment has increased to 9.5% That is why the administration needs to move its goalposts. Expect some further movement in a few months as these estimates fail yet again.