exponentially up 37 percent. what does that say about now we are starting to recover 2011 had a tremendous use of food stamps^, how can we stop the trend. clayton: get out of the recession. the number of americans on food stamps last year is remarkable, 45 million, 70 percent increase from 2007. what the c.b.o. is saying, lock, because of the jump in spending on food stamps it came at a point during the stimulus money in 2009 and they added an additional 20 percent to the stimulus law to go for food stands so those receiving food stamps got a 20 percent butch so therefore you see the increase.
got placed on administrative leave yesterday for this kind of behavior? this same guy, david foley, was responsible for overseeing $5.5 million of our stimulus money. well, look, you ve hit it exactly on the head. megyn: 5.5 billion worth of our stimulus money. thanks, david. yeah. we don t even count 5.5 million down here anymore, megyn, that s a rounding error. [laughter] even if administration could cod affix the blame on george w. bush, that doesn t make their argument any better that the government is a lean, mean, fighting, fairness machine that is going to help people live better lives and do better things if electorate doesn t believe that the government s up to that job. and as we saw with the stimulus law, as we saw with the health law, in both of those cases americans remain stoutly, staunchly unconvinced that the government s up to the job, and that s what makes the president s task difficult, and
anniversary. when the president signed it into law he made pretty big promises about what it would do. one of them his economic team predicted that unemployment by february 2012 would be about 6%. right now it s more than 2 points higher than that though trend nothing a better direction these days. it s certainly far higher than predicted back then. republicans also taking aim at the price tag as you noticed. congressman lee terry suggested today that a lot of money has been wasted on projects like solyndra. take a listen. well it failed to stimulate the economy because it was more about supporting your political friends and public entities that supported you than it was really about stimulating the economy. reporter: the push back from white house officials is that the bottom line is we were on the edge of a cliff in february of 2009 ready to fall into abyss, maybe a second great depression and this stimulus law
people remember the stimulus quote. you pass the stimulus law and you won t go above 8 per. bill: the word from the white house. that was their evaluation. that was their optimistic assessment, no doubt about it. but the question is i think if you were to try to measure this by any quantitative scale, you would say that s not right. but our point, i think remember, we are talking politic, we are not talking science. and the politics of it is they want to say the republicans haven t done anything in the first 300 day on jobs. bill: that s why they have elections. it am totally made up absurd figure. no serious person would say unemployment would be at 15 per. it s just a joke.
there. jenna: lawmakers looking into the obama administration s efforts to promote green energy projects. they are trying to figure out where all the taxpayer money came. among those testifying is a federal watchdog who raised a red flag about the loan program that gave more than a half billion dollars to that company solyndra. mike emanuel is live on capitol hill watching all of this. reporter: the hearing before the house oversight committee looked at effectiveness of the 2009 stimulus law and specifically putting department of energy programs under intense scrutiny. the department of energy inspector general says that while billions of stimulus dollars were spent by washington, many state and local communities have not used the money. we ve heard over the past year or so the idea of shovel-ready projects. experts say from the department of energy perspective there were few shovel-ready projects. here is the department of energy inspector general on the difficulties of putting this