Obama makes headlines today about more job gaps and how it’s his fear that they won’t close.

Duh!

Our company is in the business of supplying services to government agencies that are in part stimulus funded. Little of those funds has been spent yet, and certainly not a penny has come to our company, despite our very best efforts to chase after some of those projects, all year long.

I don’t care about new stimulus money. The old dollars have not been spent yet so they have stimulated nothing. Agencies appear to be sitting on them, trying to figure out what to do, and keeping themselves busy in the bureaucratic machinations of writing requirement documents, while the private sector is waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and eventually running out of resources to wait any longer.

Worse, some stimulus money, for instance in California, appears to be used to backfill funding of programs that were cut and lost. Such expenditures stimulate nothing, but rather only extend the deadline for doom of those programs.

More unemployment will follow. We have not hit bottom yet.

Mr. Obama, the stimulus, albeit an interesting idea in 2008, is not doing any stimulating. We need to think of other approaches.