When you spend $787 billion, there's a lot of pressure to show results. So, there's no surprise that success is being proclaimed across the country. States are saying that they've used the federal stimulus package money to create or save more than 388,000 jobs this year. Teachers, construction workers and other professions have realized the upside of stimulus cash according to reports from 33 states and Puerto Rico, with the remainder of the results being released on Friday.

Of course, the numbers "should be taken with a grain of salt," says Ethan Pollack of the Economic Policy Institute. The states were tasked to count the jobs created or protected, but the results have been of dubious accuracy. This doesn't mean the stats can't provide fodder to people on both sides of the aisle.

Columbia Business School's Frank Lichtenberg says the data shows a solid economic impact, and the Obama administration's Council of Economic Advisors believes the stimulus spending has taken care of between 600,000 and 1.1 million jobs.

And, there are those who disagree.

Mr. President, congratulations on passing your $787 billion stimulus bill. We hope it helps to lessen the pain of the declining economy. But the stock market has been tanking and record numbers of people are joining the ranks of the unemployed. Going to Canada for your first Presidential trip is the opposite of W's first trip to Mexico. And your talk about gloomy economic prospects stands in sharp contrast with W's out-of-touch proclamations of solid economic fundamentals. But doing the opposite of W is not going to cut it.

Are you wondering why there's bailout backlash? I think it may be because we need you to put your communications skills to work by giving us a recovery roadmap. In concept, this is a simple idea -- just tell us:

New data from the IRS shows that the average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a third from 22.9% to 17.2% in the first six years of the Bush presidency, even as their average incomes doubled to $263.3 million.

But here's what's interesting: their incomes doubled and the tax rate only fell by 5.7% meant that, on average, they paid more in taxes.

Bush's capital gains tax cuts were a huge driver of the decrease in tax rates but Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington, told Bloomberg that the rich "are realizing more of their gains due to the lower tax rate."

A note on economic polls: when evaluating them, subtract 15-20%. Case in point: U.S. public opinion toward outgoing President George W. Bush.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll taken in December 2008 found the following:

Despite the worst U.S. recession in decades, rising unemployment, declining median incomes, unprecedented home foreclosures, massive U.S. government borrowing to bailout / rescue the bank sector, and the lowest job creation of any eight-year president in the modern era, the poll found that:

• 23% of the American people said they would miss Bush, 25% said Bush managed government effectively, and about a third said he would go down in history as a good president.

Roughly a third of Americans viewing Bush as a good president?, with 25% saying he managed the government effectively? What's going on here?

Who are these people? Upper-income Americans or strong Republicans?

Exactly: either, or possibly both, which is why you need to deduct 15-20% when reading a poll, to gauge a president's support, particularly on economic issues.

One of George W. Bush's professors at Harvard Business School said, "He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago."

Exploiting a weakness in the U.S. Constitution, Bush became president in 2000 despite losing the popular vote. He ignored an August 2001 Presidential Daily Brief titled: Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S. Then he used that attack -- along with some trumped up evidence of WMDs -- to justify an invasion into Iraq that killed thousands of people and cost trillions.

Now as Bush goes on his self-pity tour before he (hopefully) leaves office in less than a week, bin Laden is apparently still alive and enjoying a last laugh at Bush. Bin Laden's latest video blames Bush for weakening America which permitted Israel to invade Gaza. Bin Laden is partially right -- Bush has weakened America.

A Democrat as the new President. Usually the party favors unions. They give a lot of money. Democrats can also count on unions to endorse them and turn out the vote. Now it is time for the party which will control The White House and Congress to pay labor back.

It may not be that simple. According to The New York Times, "labor invested more than $300 million to help elect Mr. Obama and enlarge the Democratic majority in Congress, and it expects both to enact legislation that will make it easier for millions of workers to unionize."

The most obvious case that unions may not do as well as they had hoped is the UAW. Many car workers believe Obama may ride to their rescue. The Bush Administration said the UAW would have to go along with large cuts as their part of helping GM (NYSE:GM) and Chrysler. But, potential loans form the Obama Administration to the car companies may not push the union so hard.

The car companies are probably a bad example and the newspaper industry is probably a better one. It was once one of the largest employers in the US and is still a huge provider of jobs. No so long ago the unions representing reporters, drivers, and pressmen had the leverage with management to dictate terms which put their members solidly into the middle class. As the newspaper industry has moved into a downward cycle, these unions have lost their bite.

The Obama Administration could do something for the newspaper unions. It could help bail the industry out by giving papers loans. It could help guarantee jobs. But, that won't happen. The newspaper unions will die no matter what they did to get the Democrats in office. Obama knows there is only so much money to go around. If there is not enough to help unionized industries, that's tough luck.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

What to make of the U.S. Treasury's extension of a $17.4 billion TARP loan to General Motors and Chrysler?

Way to go, inside the beltway gents and ladies!

Indeed, the plan, which contains performance requirements and thresholds that monitor viability, will be castigated by the right and left, by everyone from libertarians to vegetarians, but they won't sway economist Richard Felson into opposing the action.

"Arguably, this is the best economic news we've heard this year, outside of the oil price drop, and that shows you what type of year we've had," Felson said. "With a GM (NYSE: GM) and Chrysler failure, the U.S. economy would have neared a depression, with probably disastrous consequences for the U.S. stock market. Look on this loan not as an auto bailout, but as the first step in the restructuring of the U.S. economy."

Loan / restructuring package buys time

Is it the best use of taxpayer dollars? No. But who's to say this is not a good use of those funds, particularly during a national crisis?

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says each day we come closer to getting rid of President Bush is a day where the market is better.

This one's not going down that easy. It hasn't mattered all that much how companies have been doing, so don't think that Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) (Cramer's Take) and FedEx (NYSE: FDX) (Cramer's Take) can create any more of a rout on the downside than Du Pont (NYSE: DD) (Cramer's Take), Dow Chemical (NYSE: DOW) (Cramer's Take) or 3M (NYSE: MMM) (Cramer's Take).

The whole source of this rally is President Bush, meaning that each day we come closer to getting rid of him is a day where the market is better. If you haven't figured this out you would be shorting the heck out of this market. Consider that in the last few days we had downgrades, shortfalls, job cuts and negative news on several major Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks and that hasn't stopped the Dow.

I have not always agreed with your policies. But we're all human. You even apologized for the financial crisis and the Iraq War. This makes me think you've got legacy on your mind. If so, consider this: there is no way that pardoning Mike Milken, Bernie Ebbers and Conrad Black before you leave office will boost your legacy.

Granted, those pardons would be far less significant to historians than the things you've already apologized for, but why add to your post-presidential aggravation? Here are the reasons not to pardon these three:

• Milken - As i posted, Milken paid $650 million in fines and went to jail from March 1991 until January 1993 for securities law violations. He's a white-collar crook who's spent decades trying to burnish his image. It has not worked on me.
• Ebbers - Bernie Ebbers was convicted of orchestrating an $11 billion accounting fraud that brought WorldCom into bankruptcy, making it the second biggest in history. Lehman Brothers' recent $639 billion tops the list.
• Black - Black formerly headed Hollinger International Inc and was a member of Britain's House of Lords. He was found guilty of defrauding shareholders and entered prison in March 2008.

George W. Bush is beginning to realize he made some mighty big mistakes. He admitted today that he's sorry the stock market and economy have collapsed because it happened under his watch. And he thinks that there was an intelligence failure when it comes to those Iraqi WMDs.

He'd like us to believe that he was just a passive victim of all this bad stuff that happened around him. If he is really that clueless, I need help understanding how he got "elected" twice. In any case, there's plenty of evidence that Douglas Feith created the WMD evidence to please Dick Cheney.

And Bush repeatedly ignored warnings that subprime mortgages were being abused and that securitization was creating a huge risk for the economy. He also failed to apologize for two other memorable events during his presidency -- his August 2001 decision to ignore that President's Daily Brief called "Osama bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." and his famed New Orleans Katrina flyover, capped by his heck of a job Brownie comment.

Bush has left the U.S. in a sorry state -- and I'm sorry, but sorry won't cut it.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter.

Experts inside the Bush Administration tried to warn about the mortgage meltdown. They even proposed new regulations to set guidelines for the risky loans written by the banks who now have their hat in hand looking for a bailout. The banks fought these regulations and the Bush administration caved in. Now, we taxpayers are paying for this lapse in judgment in two ways -- an economic meltdown and a huge tax bill. According to an Associated Press report today, regulators warnings to banks in 2005 included:

• Banks were warned exotic mortgages were often inappropriate for buyers with bad credit. Anyone surprised about that?
• Banks that bundled and sold mortgages were told to be sure investors know what they were buying. We know that's not true. AAA ratings were given to much of this debt that proved to be of much lower quality and much more risky.
• Regulators urged banks to help buyers make responsible decisions and clearly advise people that interest rates might skyrocket and huge payments might be due sooner than expected. Do you believe that mortgage brokers or banks clearly warned people about the dangers of the loans they were taking? I don't.

The first rule of public relations is never get in a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel. And a major tenet of investing is don't take a stock position in conflict with Congressional policy, once Congress has committed to a program.

The wisdom behind the second adage, like the first, is obvious enough: Congress has the ability to suddenly and substantially change the investment landscape.

Case in point: Congress, which is currently hearing testimony on a performance-based rescue package for General Motors (NYSE: GM), Ford (NYSE: F), and Chrysler, could end up further funding reform by the Big Three by buying millions of the companies' vehicles for the U.S. government's auto fleet.

'Catching three fish with one cast'

Economist David H. Wang says the tactic has appeal in several areas -- economic, industrial, energy.

"It would help the three companies retain essential employees while transforming their operations, it would keep more industrial spin-off jobs in the U.S., and it would save energy by increasing U.S. government auto fleet efficiency," Wang said. "It would be like catching three fish with one cast and I think the new Obama administration would look very favorably on the energy efficiency aspect, both private and public sector dimensions."

Shares of GM fell 30 cents to $2.79, while Ford declined 16 cents $1.52 in Wednesday morning trading.

First, the United States Congress should pass and the president of the United States should sign a rescue package for General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, post-haste.

If this was the "Roaring '90s" or even the "Fabulous '50s," an operational cessation by General Motors (NYSE: GM), Ford (NYSE: F) and Chrysler, would hurt the U.S. economy. As investors know, however, we are not in the 1990s or the 1950s, but in a teetering economy, and an auto sector cessation would be devastating, driving the U.S. economy into a deeper and longer recession.

Second, the notion that only companies that "perform" in the free market should continue and that others, the underperformers, should fail, as an absolute rule, simply has not been the history of the United States economy. Moreover, dozens of companies receive billions of dollars in subsidies from the U.S. government, which is you, the taxpayer.

Need a few examples? Let's do what the late, great New York Governor Al Smith would do: Let's look at the record.

It looks like the automobile industry is being led like a turkey to the slaughter as we approach Thanksgiving. While companies like General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) have been working overtime to produce a fleet of statistics to bolster their case for a Washington bailout, it's clear that President Bush and the Republicans are eager to wield a sharpened ax on its ever-more vulnerable neck.

The pre-bailout buildup follows the same narrative structure as the one for the Iraq war and the $810 billion bank bailout bill. With the Iraq War, the specter of a mushroom cloud was dropped on our unsuspecting heads. With Paulson's plan for a reverse auction to buy toxic waste, it was the threat of heavenly retribution. And now, the auto industry is promising 2.5 million lost jobs and $200 billion in government costs -- up from $125 billion last week -- if Washington does not bail it out.

The political forces lining up against the automobile industry appear more powerful than those who want to bail it out. While congressional Democrats want to divert $25 billion from Paulson's plan to bail out the auto industry, Bush and the Republicans oppose the idea. And until January, they appear to have the upper hand.

Detroit's Big Three automakers are finding out assistance is a two-sided process.

President-elect Barack Obama is backing a plan in which U.S. automakers would receive $50 billion in federal aid in exchange for structural changes and oversight by an auto czar or board. An auto czar or board would be patterned after the bailout of Chrysler in 1979 or the City of New York in 1975.

During those two assistance / loan guarantee efforts, the U.S. Government ended up making money on the deals. The revamped Chrysler returned to profitability and actually led both General Motors and Ford in several vehicle categories in the ensuing decades. The streamlined, pro-business City of New York experienced an economic, civic, and cultural renaissance in the 1990s that was surpassed only by the 'Roaring 20s.'

Economist David H. Wang told BloggingStocks Thursday a bankruptcy by General Motors or Ford "is economically and psychologically unacceptable." If both filed for bankruptcy and operations were disrupted, "U.S. unemployment would soar over 10%" and the U.S. economy would incur into its deepest recession since the 1981-82 Reagan Administration recession, he said.