I was cruising the website for the city of Irvine, CA when I stumbled on their “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)” page.
ARRA is the $800 billion federal stimulus package that Obama said would create 3.5 million jobs in America (that’s a cost to you and me of $229,000 per job “created”). A damn expensive way to create a job.
Many people that I agree with were against the stimulus package for the reasons that are becoming obvious now…stimulus doesn’t create jobs.
Case in point, Irvine spent $2 million on repaving roads and repairing curbs, gutters and sidewalks. How many jobs did this five month project create? ZERO.
In fact, all of the other projects listed so far of the federal taxpayer money they intend to spend declare the number of jobs to be created as, “To be determined” but for two exceptions.
One exception was for $9,000 dollars spent that “increased hours to existing jobs.” Jobs created? ZERO.
The second exception was for $170,000 to update the bathrooms at the train station for handicapped people. This created a whopping 12 jobs in November of 2009. Alas, the project was completed two months ago. 12 jobs for 6 months? That’s not stimulus.
It’s bad enough that one of the projects is to spend $354,000 for a “Bicycle Bridge Landscaping Enhancement” project, but what’s worse, is that taxpayers from the other 49 states in the Union, are now having their hard-earned money spent here in Irvine, on new trees, shrubs, mulch, sprinkler systems and the installation of interpretive signs. Interpretive signs…that’s important.
Obama has added $800 billion to the national debt for this program. That’s $800 billion plus interest that we, and our children, will be working the rest of our lives to pay off, and for what…new trees? Mulch? Interpretive signs? Curb repairs? And NO NEW JOBS.
This absolutely ridiculous, ineffective, expensive and criminally wasteful use of our tax money is happening in towns all over this country, just like in Irvine.
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Categories: Government Failures
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