Where's Our Stimulus Money?

Along with many other Americans, I can’t help but wonder what happened to the 787 billion dollars that was supposedly pumped into the economy. I, for one, haven’t seen any of this money and it seems that the economy continues to regress and jobs continue to be lost. No one, least of all the American people—whose money it is that is being spent—seems to know what the heck is going on, or why our economy continues to descend into the pitfalls of recession with this so-called Recovery Bill.

The 1,073 page stimulus bill passed through the Democrat-controlled Congress with ease just four weeks after President Obama stepped into office. Obama defended the need for haste in the passage of the stimulus bill by stating, “Each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.” And the politics of fear worked. The stimulus package, promised to “save or create” roughly 3.5 million jobs, was rushed through Congress and passed before there was sufficient time to read it. The irony is that there were 1.6 million more jobs the day the stimulus bill passed than there are right now. The employment rate, starting at 7.2%, has now risen to 10%. Therefore, we would have been better off, and had significantly more jobs if Obama had done nothing at all!

Despite the inefficiency of this stimulus package in the employment category, what does this bill mean for taxpayers? Republican Congressman, Paul Ryan stated when the bill was passed, “The headline price tag of $787 billion doesn’t include the extra $348 billion it will take to finance the new debt, or what it will cost when Congress extends the spending programs in the bill, as is likely — as much as $2 trillion more. Add in the billions that are being used to prop up the financial system, and when the dust settles on 2009, with millions of baby boomers retiring and entitlement spending exploding, taxpayers will face a financial nightmare.” Despite the shock of these astronomical numbers, Congressman Ryan was being far too kind. The actual cost of the stimulus, according the Congressional Budget Office, will be 3.27 trillion dollars!

If we are going to spend this kind of money to improve the economy, it has to be going to good use, right? Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Despite the money invested in Wall Street which was expected to trickle down but has yet to do so, most of the money seems to be “porkulus” spending rather than stimulus. Vice President Joe Biden warned Americans to expect that their stimulus money—billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money— to be either wasted or scammed. So, wait… we’re supposed to “expect” our hard-earned money to be “wasted or scammed” by our own government? According to Senator Tom Coburn’s stimulus waste report; the top ten abuses of stimulus money are ranked as follows:

1. $1.5 million in “free” stimulus money for a new wastewater treatment plant resulting in higher utility costs for residents of Perkins, Oklahoma.

2. $1 billion went to FutureGen in Mattoon, Illinois, the “biggest earmark of all time” for a power plant that may never work.

3. $15 million for “shovel-ready” repairs to little-used bridges in rural Wisconsin were given priority over widely used bridges that are structurally deficient.

4. $800,000 for little-used John Martha Airport in Johnstown, Pennsylvania airport to repave a back-up runway; the ‘Airport for Nobody’ has already received tens of millions in taxpayer dollars.

5. $3.4 million for a wildlife “eco-passage” in Florida to take animals safely under a busy roadway.

6. Nevada non-profit gets a $2 million weatherization contract after recently being fired for the same type of work.

7. $1.15 million went to installation of a new guard rail for the non-existent Optima Lake in Oklahoma.

8. Nearly $10 million went to renovate an abandoned train station that hasn’t been used in 30 years.

9. 10,000 dead people get security checks, but the Social Security Administration blames a tough deadline.

10. Town of Union, New York was encouraged to spend a $578,000 grant it did NOT request for a homeless problem it claims it does not have.

Unfortunately, all of the listed expenditures are just some of the pork barrel expenses that have resulted from the stimulus plan, despite Obama’s promise to forbid all earmarks in the bill. Some other examples include $1 billion dollars for Amtrak, which hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years, and $400 million for global warming research. Meanwhile, companies are continuing to lay off more and more workers, homes are being foreclosed, factories are shutting down, and the American people are suffering from this economic downturn with seemingly little help from the government who promised to bail them out.

Only a small percentage of the stimulus money has been spent to benefit the people thus far. It appears that some of the stimulus bill was saturated with waste to pay off politically-connected liberals; which the Republicans predicted from the beginning. This is supposed to be a new era of bipartisanship, but the bill was written on the wish list of every living—or dead—Democratic interest group. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, “We won the election. We wrote the bill.” I guess Republicans can let them take all the credit they want for this one.

What makes the Obama administration believe that they can spend our money better than we can? If they were to put more of an effort to place the stimulus money in the hands of the people, the economy would have a much better chance of taking care of itself. The money spent on pork barrel projects is doing nothing to benefit the nation as a whole and is ultimately a huge waste, as our own Vice President said himself. What we need right now, first and foremost, are jobs. For a program to be efficient , it must bring forth economic activity that otherwise would not have taken place. The classic example is public works. When a new road or bridge is built, construction companies have to purchase concrete, steel and other materials that create business for other companies. They also employ workers that otherwise would not be working, paying them wages that they will spend, producing jobs and incomes for other workers.

America was founded on capitalism and free enterprise, but the stimulus bill is just another plot to widen government control of business and the economy. The founding fathers intended for private businesses to thrive and the government to lightly regulate rather than take over. With the stimulus plan, small businesses are going to be hit with tax increases to help pay for the spending. As a result, these small businesses are going to have a hard time keeping their employees. This is unfortunate because it is these businesses that have created the majority of stable jobs in the past.

As we all know, the economy naturally experiences ups and downs. Although the economy has been declining for what seems like years and years, this is a normal occurrence and most economists believe that the economy can usually straighten itself out over time. Obama picked a perfect time to run his campaign focusing on all the economic problems that were being struggled with during the Bush administration. He promised change and focused on government as the solution to the problem while gaining America’s trust with his swift speeches and novel ideas. America: Government isn’t the answer to this economic crisis, it’s the problem.