The Cynical Economist

As time passes, we learn more and more about what is really going on, with the money WE borrowed for the funding of the $787 BILLION “STIMULUS” bill.

A whole ‘lotta spending and not a lot of stimulating, that’s what.

What is occurring right now is a big transfer of wealth from the nation’s coffers, (that presumably are jointly “owned” by the American people and supposed to be used for their common interest) to privately owned companies, that seized the opportunity to snatch all the money, that “our” government so irresponsibly is giving away.

Take Michigan for example. The White House Web site, recovery.gov, reports that Michigan has received $5.2 billion and has created or saved 22,500 jobs. It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that the taxpayers paid out  $231,000 for every job created or saved in Michigan. And when it all comes down to it, our government can’t even do an adequate job of figuring out how many jobs it created/saved. AP found out, that Salary raises are counted as saved job. Also the bureaucrats are inventing numbers from thin air to cover the unbelievable misuse of the stimulus money. Read here

The federal government sent Bob Bray $26,174 in stimulus aid to fix a fence and replace the roofs on public apartments in Blooming Grove, Texas, a town of fewer than 900 people outside Dallas. He hired five roofers and an inspector to do the job. But the number of jobs he reported to the government looked very different — 450 jobs.

“Oh, no,” said Bray, who runs the local public housing authority part-time with his wife, Linda, when asked about the discrepancy. He said that he told the government that he had created six jobs but that a federal official told him that wasn’t right. So he reported the number of hours the roofers worked instead. The Department of Housing and Urban Development caught the mistake, but he couldn’t fix it before the jobs figures were published. “The money was great, but the reports are really confusing,” he said. “I’ve been fighting with it for over a month and a half.

and also here

In June, the federal government spent $1,047 in stimulus money to buy a rider mower from the Toro Company to cut the grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery in Arkansas. Now, a report on the government’s stimulus Web site improbably claims that that single lawn mower sale helped save or create 50 jobs.

The Government is just trying to cover their overspending and incompetence  by overstating how many jobs were created and saved. They are trowing money to their friends and cronies and laying us in our faces, that it is all for the public good.

It is all good that you can go to the government web page and check the names of the grant recipients and how they claim they will use the money. But is someone actual checking   how the money are spent by the award recipients?

How hard is it to form a company, think of a weatherization project or something considered to be environmentally friendly, write a  grant proposal and submit it to the stupid bureaucrats. It seems to be pretty easy, if you consider what is being funded with the money that are supposedly creating jobs.

Read and wipe cause you will not see your money nor the unemployed will see any jobs…

Let’s start with $100,000 for a program in Maryland to keep tabs on how often doctors and nurses wash their hands at hospitals. Now that is really going to stimulate some jobs, isn’t it?

Then check out this lengthy list from Tom Coburn’s office:

- $300,000 for a GPS-equipped helicopter to hunt for radioactive rabbit droppings at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state.

- $30 million for a spring training baseball complex for the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies.

- $11 million for Microsoft to build a bridge connecting its two headquarter campuses in Redmond, Wash., which are separated by a highway.

- $430,000 to repair a bridge in Iowa County, Wis., that carries 10 or fewer cars per day.

- $800,000 for the John Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pa., serving about 20 passengers per day, to build a backup runway.

- $219,000 for Syracuse University to study the sex lives of freshmen women.

- $2.3 million for the U.S. Forest Service to rear large numbers of arthropods, including the Asian longhorned beetle, the nun moth and the woolly adelgid.

- $3.4 million for a 13-foot tunnel for turtles and other wildlife attempting to cross U.S. 27 in Lake Jackson, Fla.

- $1.15 million to install a guardrail for a persistently dry lake bed in Guymon, Okla.

- $9.38 million to renovate a century-old train depot in Lancaster County, Pa., that has not been used for three decades.

- $2.5 million in stimulus checks sent to the deceased.

- $6 million for a snow-making facility in Duluth, Minn.

- $173,834 to weatherize eight pickup trucks in Madison County, Ill.

- $20,000 for a fish sperm freezer at the Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery in South Dakota.

- $380,000 to spay and neuter pets in Wichita, Kan.

- $300 apiece for thousands of signs at road construction sites across the country announcing that the projects are funded by stimulus money.

- $1.5 million for a fence to block would-be jumpers from leaping off the All-American Bridge in Akron, Ohio.

- $1 million to study the health effects of environmentally friendly public housing on 300 people in Chicago.

- $356,000 for Indiana University to study childhood comprehension of foreign accents compared with native speech.

- $983,952 for street beautification in Ann Arbor, Mich., including decorative lighting, trees, benches and bike paths.

- $148,438 for Washington State University to analyze the use of marijuana in conjunction with medications like morphine.

- $462,000 to purchase 22 concrete toilets for use in the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri

- $3.1 million to transform a canal barge into a floating museum that will travel the Erie Canal in New York state.

- $1.3 million on government arts jobs in Maine, including $30,000 for basket makers, $20,000 for storytelling and $12,500 for a music festival.

- $71,000 for a hybrid car to be used by student drivers in Colchester, Vt., as well as a plug-in hybrid for town workers decked out with a sign touting the vehicle’s energy efficiency.

- $1 million for Portland, Ore., to replace 100 aging bike lockers and build a garage that would house 250 bicycles.

This is what happens when the government inserts itself in the free market – money are being stolen by the “smart” businesses, who see the opportunity of getting something for nothing. In return the businesses will contribute some of the stolen money back to the politicians, who enabled them to get the money in the first place.

Why the hell we pay Microsoft  money to build a freaking bridge for their campus? Did one of the richest companies in America run out of money? Nope. I don’t think so. But you see that is how the money are being kinda laundered. Politicians pay for the Microsoft’s bridge, thus Microsoft save more of their company money, busting profits and so on and in a election year part of  the Microsoft profits are contributed to their old friends running  ruining the country.  Thats how it works.

The only ones screwed in this deal are the taxpayers and their children. Any jobs created are, at best, temporary and the one thing that is going to last for very long time is the debt that was  created by the lairs and the crooks.

Spending our money in this manner should be punishable by law, but right now I cannot see politicians investigating themselves nor holding the recipients of the grants from the stimulus bill in any way accountable.

The outcome of all that irresponsible spending will be destruction of the American society as we know it. The middle class is going to be buried under the mountain of debt that the politicians and their friends are piling up. Soon America will become Banana Republic with few very rich and corrupt on top and a lot of very poor slaves working for those same people which destroyed them.

Also read this - Biden Tells CNN: Economy Has ‘Hit Bottom’ and is Coming Back. LOL