Stimulus Creating Jobs In Places That Don't Exist

[mrjarrell]

The Obama administrations stimulus is creating jobs in places that don't exist. Imagine my surprise. These people have no idea where that money (which belongs to our children) is going. It's an abysmal failure.

From Reason

From ABC News:

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 9th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.
There's one problem, though: There is no 9th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.
There's no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government's Recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.
In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don't exist.

ABC's reporter Jonathan Karl drily notes that Recovery.gov was created to foster greater accountability and transparency in stimulus spending.
More here.

We are so screwed.

[Dryden]

Facts have never gotten in the way of the most successful liberal program in Neverland history.

They forgot to mention:
- Twenty thousand children now have access to an Xbox.
- Flowers are now growing in concrete.
-Crime rates have been reduced to zero (hey, there's nobody to commit the crime.)
-The air just feels better.
-All the clouds look like Obama.
-The 9th District is scheduled to get another five Billion $$$

[Indecision]

I kind of feel like i'm on the outside looking in a building during controlled demolition. The explosives are meticulously being placed right now.

[jediagh]

tag 4 mailing

[rambone]

It would be nice if the people responsible for this blunder/theft would be removed from office or brought to justice.

$6.4 Billion Stimulus Goes to Phantom Districts

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist. According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to “create or save” just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts–almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

The stimulus revived 8 recently retired congressional districts.

Pennsylvania’s 21st District has received just under $2 million in funds. Mississippi’s 5th District and Oklahoma’s 6th received $1 million from the legislation, respectively. All three were eliminated by the 2000 census.

Many other recipients carried the banner for congressional districts that have been defunct for decades. South Carolina’s 7th took the cake, garnering more than $27 million in stimulus funds, despite being eliminated in 1930. And Virginia’s 12th District may have been written off at the start of the Civil War, but it must carry some sentimental value in Old Dominion–it received more than $2 million, according to Recovery.gov.

The stimulus helped to create 35 congressional districts in Washington D.C. and the four American territories, all of which have no congressional districts. These areas received $5 of the $6.4 billion distributed to the non-existent districts.

New Mexico Watchdog broke the story on Monday morning after finding that $26 million in stimulus money had been distributed to 13 congressional districts–ten more than the state actually has. Similar reports soon followed from New Hampshire, Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota and West Virginia.

A reporter from the Montana Policy Institue confronted the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees the site, about these non-existent congressional districts on Monday afternoon. Ed Pound, Director of Communications for the board, said that the faulty information came from recipients of stimulus funds.

“People make errors, and we’ve found people are making errors in these reports,” Pound said…

Recipients file their reports on a password-protected site. That information is then relayed to officials who oversee the recovery.gov website to post, Pound said. Unless an egregious error is noted, Pound said they post the information exactly as it is received.

“Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.

The integrity of the data, however, has also come under scrutiny several times in the past month. Numerous media studies have revealed a reporting system riddled with errors and results that are “impossible” to calculate, such as the number of jobs “saved” by the bill.

Vice President Joe Biden admitted that the administration’s statistics were flawed after an Associated Press study revealed several instances of exaggerated and outright false job creation. The vice president acknowledged that “further updates and corrections are going to be needed.”

The administration may have begun to do just that. 60,000 jobs were cut from original stimulus estimates on Monday, citing faulty data.

Pound says that the board plans on correcting the site’s other reporting errors during the next data collection cycle, which is set for January.

The full data from the Franklin Center study can be found below or by clicking here. All information was pulled directly from recovery.gov.

[Dr Falken]

I like how you can't spend money unless it's defined as being spent in a congessional district, fictional or otherwise. Underscores the nature of the spending as political greasing of the palm. Another example of machine politics.

[Woodsman]

Since the government is so fond of acronyms I find the choice of words for this more than a little amusing. Let's see...

Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board

R.A.T.B

Looks like Rat Basterds, if you use a little imagination. Fits too.

[thej27]

So how can we create an INGO congressional district?

[pudly]

Don't worry, all those new districts will be gerrymandered Democratic...

[Dryden]

Originally Posted by thej27

So how can we create an INGO congressional district?

Which of us would be so corrupt as to take this position?

Ummmm. Well, if I get to tax every member and charge for each posting, and have complete immunity from the Ban Hammer... OK, I'll volunteer.