The first stimulus has been so successful they want another one. How many trillions of debt do we need to go into before the nation wakes up?
And people wonder why I'm so relentlessly critical of government. It takes something as woefully inefficient, self-serving, and corrupt as the state to create a single job per every $2 million invested. Some people could start successful businesses with the money that paid for a single public job. Hell, I've worked for companies that only had about that much in annual revenue...
Let's take the expected total, just to be generous: they expect to create 264 jobs for $111 million. that's $420,454.54 per job. Tell ya what, cut me a check for half that amount and you'll never hear from me again and you can do whatever you want with the rest (call it tax at 50%) I'll consider myself "employed" as a writer and you can put that down in your stats. Everybody wins!
Well... What's so little? The amount of jobs "created"? They admitted themselves they've been stuck in bureaucratic red tape and aren't finished getting things underway. Furthermore, if the object was merely to get people out of the unemployment line, we could enlarge the Army or at the very least hire people to rake up leaves. The whole point of the stimulus was to give communities and states money to upgrade their infrastructure, because most places can no longer afford to do so. That costs a lot of money for raw materials alone. How much concrete, steel, and vehicles do you think these departments need? Isn't Los Angeles covered in pavement? And those jobs aren't being accounted for. All this steel and concrete has to come from somewhere, and has to get there somehow. Those are jobs being created or saved. The resulting infrastructure makes it easier for people and goods to get to and from places, that lowers the cost of transportation and helps grow the economy. I know it's working, I see MDoT paving roads and repairing bridges every day on my way to work.
This is more true now than it's ever been in my lifetime, [YT="Former Pres. Reagan on govt."]6ixNPplo-SU[/YT]
I can get 54 bums to clean my windshield for a total of....if I'm in a generous mood - around 200 dollars. Granted, each job would only last 2 minutes, which is probably double the lifespan of the 54 jobs in question. :unconvinced:
