Some Things Just Don’t Look Right

Posted by Larry Miller on November 18, 2009 under Why | Be the First to Comment

There has been quite a fuss about the White House web site, http://www.recovery.gov, touting the wonderful success in creating (or saving) jobs with their stimulus money. We are to read this and swoon with delight at the way our federal government is handling the situation with effectiveness and efficiency. Unfortunately, as with most everything from this current administration, the site is long on promise and hype and short on usable information. Aside from two minor points this is all good to know. The first point is that economists have no metric that covers “jobs saved” as it’s kind of hard to count and prove. The second point is that pages that were available yesterday have apparently been pulled down in embarrassment.

My home state of Virginia has eleven congressional districts, yet money was spent and jobs created (or saved) in districts 00 through 98. This information is coming from an organization headed by a man who told us he was in almost all of our 57 states. Admittedly, the bulk of the money is listed as having been spent in the real eleven districts. One really has to wonder what good openness would do us poor citizens, if the information we are given has little or only a tangential relationship to reality.

The formerly available table tells us that a little over $51K was sent to our 98th district to create 0 jobs. None were even “saved”! Just a little shy of $700K was sent to our non-existent 36th district to create (or save) 10 jobs. That’s a lot of money to slip off into the black hole of political corruption into the hands of dishonest politicians, union officials and connected cronies. Yet that is chump change compared to the more than a billion dollars that went into the notorious Democrat Bobby Scott’s 3rd district. You have to be from the Old Dominion to grasp the irony of this situation… although Scott’s district went a long way to secure the Obama victory last year.

The White House might say it was bad form to point out that the smallest amount listed for the eleven legitimate districts found it’s way to Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s 7th district… a mere $73 million. Can anyone say “political payback”. While the disparity itself is outrageous, the real numbers are even more so. With all this money… this borrowed and printed-out-of-thin-air money, it’s not hard to see how the President can tweak and twist congressmen and women to get his nefarious schemes passed.

Other facts that can be gleaned by reviewing the chart is that in Virginia’s 2nd district, represented by Democrat Glenn Nye, a little more than $240 million was allocated in an effort to create (or save) a little more than 240 jobs. Granted that not all the money is gone… yet, but that almost a million dollars a job created (or saved)? It’s like one of my childhood favorites (yeah, I watched this stuff when I was a kid), the gravelly voice senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, used to say, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” And that was in the 50’s and 60’s!

It is possible in their enthusiasm to throw our money, our children’s money and Chinese money at the situation and appear to be effectively solving peoples problems, the capable and energetic bureaucrats confused congressional districts with General Assembly districts – there are one hundred of these in Virginia. I have not taken the time to research other states with phantom congressional districts, but it may be a possibility. Even if this is the case, it is indicative of the lack of attention to detail that opens up this era of government handouts into a bonanza for the morally challenged. Perhaps this is why the program is so popular with congress, unions and their cohorts.

Whatever the reason, it is apparent that the people running the program can’t even do a reasonable job of pretending that distribution of the funds is anywhere near under control. While I applaud the concept of openness and listing where the funds are being spent, this effort, along with other efforts to obfuscate and outright disseminate false information pretty much locks me into a highly skeptical view of any information coming out of the Obama administration. This latest insult to our intelligence does not even look plausible or pass the smell test.

Many of us understand the old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” Well, we are long past the twice and approaching seventy times seven… which we may forgive, but, for the sake of our country and our children, we cannot disregard.