Vin Suprynowicz

Speaking before a carefully hand-picked audience — most of the 500 tickets to the gathering in the Lawlor Events Center at the University of Nevada, Reno were distributed through the office of Majority Leader Harry Reid — Vice President Joe Biden assured Northern Nevadans Friday that the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan has started to move the nation toward economic recovery, and that it’s Nevada’s own Harry Reid who made sure Nevadans are getting their share.

As evidence of economic recovery, the vice president mentioned that stocks have risen by 35 percent since January, with the Dow Jones industrial average topping the 10,000 mark last week.
“It is the beginning,” Mr. Biden said. “It is restoring the savings of middle-class families. We were in free fall in this economy. Everyone forgets that.”

But is the market recovering due to the success of the Obama initiatives, or because the Democrats’ carbon-trading, “cap-and-tax” boondoggle appears dead? And those investments are denominated in dollars, of course. What the non-stop running of the Washington printing presses is going to do to the purchasing power of the dollar remains to be seen.

Protesters were held across the street from the campus, which thus took on the look of a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic party. For Mr. Biden’s message was hardly non-partisan, as he stressed Nevada would have a hard time being “serviced when you don’t have a senior senator.” Retaining Democrat Reid in office is the “lifeblood of getting any blood to Nevada,” he said.

Interesting. So it’s the vice president’s position that voters in the 25 states whose senators enjoy below-average seniority should expect to get the shaft? Where’s that leave tiny Delaware, which presumably got a new senator to replace Mr. Biden just this year? More on that in a moment.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Biden spoke at a fund-raising breakfast for Sen. Reid at a Reno hotel-casino, channeling an argument against conservatives that’s been in use since at least 1933 when he said critics of the stimulus plan and health care reform “know what they’re against, but we don’t know what they’re for.”

As usual, allowing people to keep their own money and spend it as they choose as characterized as “just being against everything” — sort of like complaining that the prisoner on death row is being absurd when he voices opposition to hanging, firing squad, AND lethal injection.

(Come on. You can’t be against EVERYTHING. Do you want people to say you’re “not a team player”?)

Both Mr. Biden and Sen. Reid declared that 4,000 tax-funded Nevada teaching jobs have already been “saved” by stimulus funds (many of them presumably at tax-funded Nevada State College, whose founders insisted the glorified trade school would be funded entirely with private funds.)
The vice president further vowed that on Oct. 30 he will announce just how many jobs, total, have been “saved or created” by the stimulus plan.

That will surely be welcome — even though I can throw a virgin into the nearest volcano and claim I just “saved” every job on the planet, since otherwise the great god Chthulu was scheduled to eat us all for breakfast. (Can you prove otherwise?)

Welcome because, only three days after the college pep rally in Reno, the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation announced Nevada joblessness rose from 13.2 percent in August to 13.3 percent in September, and that the jump in the Las Vegas market was even more severe — from 13.4 percent to 13.9 percent in the single month.

“Everything is going well in Nevada,” Mr. Reid insisted last week, reporting that realtors in Las Vegas tell him they see signs of economic recovery, and that Las Vegas hotels remain full on weekends. “We’re doing fine,” he emphasized

A sunny disposition isn’t all bad. Las Vegans certainly are doing their best. But Sen. Reid apparently hasn’t had the experience of driving to his favorite Las Vegas pizza joint or insurance or travel agency, only to find the storefront suddenly empty.

The national unemployment rate is 9.8 percent — bad enough. But in Las Vegas, more than 135,000 people are out of work. Unemployed people don’t eat out, or buy much in the way of new clothes or cars. And so the spiral continues.

Back in February, when Sen. Reid was helping to enact the huge, special-interest “stimulus” pork bill, Nevada’s unemployment stood at 10 percent. At that time, he promised the Democrats’ massive spending bill “would create three and a half million jobs across the country, including 34,000 in Nevada.”

Are they hiding all those new jobs up at Area 51?

On top of that, on the very day Sen. Reid and Vice President Biden were engaged in their mutual back-patting at UNR, the Treasury Department revealed the federal deficit had surged to an all-time high of $1.4 trillion Ð a 17 percent increase in the past nine months. That deficit number, which more than tripled last year’s record, is higher than those of the final four years of the Bush Administration Ð combined.

“In the eight months since the passage of the so-called stimulus, the only numbers that have risen are the unemployment rate and the federal deficit,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brian Walsh.

Following Mr. Biden’s UNR speech, Robert Uithoven, spokesman for one of Sen. Reid’s Republican challengers, former state Sen. Sue Lowden, said Mr. Biden should be embarrassed to assert that Sen. Reid must continue in office to ensure Nevada keeps receiving adequate federal support.

Mr. Uithoven said Nevada ranks last in the nation in federal “stimulus” spending on a per capita basis — despite employing Sen. Reid “the heavy hitter” — and 49th in what it receives back from the federal government in comparison with taxes its residents pay.

The Review-Journal reported in February that Nevada’s per capita haul from the stimulus plan was $560 per person, second lowest in the nation. Mr. Biden’s home state of Delaware, on the other hand, received … $1,360 per person, highest in the nation.