Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and a frequent critic of the White House, says President Barack Obama’s expensive stimulus spending ideas have clearly failed and warns against their revival.

During the recent State of the Union speech, Obama called for renewed investment in education, research, and transportation alongside spending freezes elsewhere, a signal some on the right took to mean a second stimulus effort is ahead, despite the huge federal deficit.

“President Barack Obama’s $814 billion economic expansion has woefully failed to reach each of its self-imposed targets,” Issa writes in the Financial Times.

Darrell Issa

“The president’s stimulus package promised (after adjusting for inflation) that gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2010 would be roughly $15,200 billion,” Issa writes.

“Yet the latest figures, released this month, fell short by some $400 billion. Instead of being an important milestone for the global recovery, the data are just one further example of the failure of Obama’s Keynesian misadventure.”

The economy grew by 3.2 percent in the fourth quarter, less than the 3.5 percent economists expected but enough for some to declare victory over the prospect of deflation and declare the booming economy awaits. Part of the reason for the rise in GDP, however, was rising trade on the weakening U.S. dollar.

Issa criticized administration figures who praised the result and promised jobs would soon follow. He pointed out that Obama and Vice President Joe Biden once predicted that, thanks to the stimulus, unemployment would never top 8 percent and would by this date be back near 7 percent.

The current unemployment rate is 9 percent, where it has been stuck for 20 months, Issa writes.

“The truth is that real GDP is just 3 percent larger than it was in the quarter just before the stimulus was passed, while the current employment situation is little short of dire,” Issa writes.

In a recent speech, Obama asked U.S. business leaders to “get off the sidelines” and create new jobs.

"American companies have nearly $2 trillion sitting on their balance sheets and I know that many of you have told me that you are waiting for demand to rise before you get off the sidelines and expand, and that with millions of Americans out of work, demand has risen more slowly than any of us would like,” Obama told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“We are in this together."