Bill McMorris
The Franklin Center
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.
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This is really sickening, and they won't allow senior citizens a badly needed cost of living raise because of the economy. They can steal all this money and get away with it.
Thanks government for putting my kids and grandkids and their kids in debt for their whole lives!!!!!
Somebody needs to be investigating the people, in the state it happened in, on why they reported the wrong info. Somebody got to fill their pockets and quite heavily.
What a mess.
But I come from infamous Tuscumbia, MO, and we are happily getting a new $8.5 million bridge because of the stimulus. The workers building it are sure happy; many had been laid off for a long time. And even though said bridge sits in a village of fewer than 200 people, more than 2,500 vehicles cross it every day, which is a fact CNN missed when they dubbed it the bridge in the middle of nowhere back in March. Maybe after the new ones open I'll quit having the nightmare about falling off the old one in my car and drowning in the Osage River. (I have a lifelong fear of water.)
We need an explaination as to how these phantom districts got created. If it was intentional, heads need to roll.
And we want these yahoos to run our health care? When will the obamatrons going to learn that bog government just means more debt and more taxes?
This makes me feel sick to my stomach.
we need to go after congress, not the president for this one
The real investigation should be: States that received money and how the states reported it. The Administration sent the money to the states and it was up to the states to report the allocation of the funds. If North Dakota reported 99 districts, find out who did that reporting and what North Dakota did with the money!!! Now that would be a complete unbiased look at the situation.
The money was distributed to districts that do not exist. Then I should assume someone on the other end received funds, placed them somewhere or allocated money to a project of some sort? Or, the funds vaporized into cyberspace never to be recovered? Maybe the money was allocated but never sent, therefore 6.4 billion remains with the treasury. Data entry is only as good as the persons who do the work and the software utilized. This "glitch" in the system can be corrected, to believe this is an indictment of the stimulus program shallow.
They can give out that much to phantom districs but can't give a one time grant of $20,000.00 to a real person who could use the money to pay off debts, pay needs ahead & stimulate the real economy.
Come on now, we all know this was just a minor error right, after all Biden told us so. We all know jobs were created, see, all you have to do is move this number over here. Magic, compliments of the tooth fairy.