Was This Porgram Necessary? Part 2

This follow up to government waste is based on a September 3, 2009 AP article that appeared on Earthlink news. It was an article on a statement by Vice President Joe Biden on how well the $787 billion stimulus package was working. You remember Joe, he was the candidate that proclaimed during last year's campaign the FDR went on TV when the stock market crashed in 1929 and reassured Americans that everything was going to be alright. Unfortunately, FDR was not President in 1929 and TV existed only in a lab. Thus, Joe has never had a lot of credibility with me which is why I relied on an external source for the facts in this post.

Mr. Biden "proclaimed success beyond expectations" relative to the stimulus results. However, the article had a differing opinion in many instances:

• Although 192 airports were targeted for stimulus money, a federal watchdog launched an investigation as to why 50 of these projects did not meet the grant criteria.
• Four of the airports have a history of mismanaging Federal grants according to the investigation.
• While there were 2,400 military construction projects from the stimulus, millions of dollars were lost because many of these projects were not subjected to competitive bids.
• Of the 2476 bridges that were to receive stimulus money, nearly half of them, 1,123 bridges, passed safety inspections with high marks that normally would not qualify for Federal money, i.e. they were in good shape, were not about to fall down as the Vice President claimed, and in no need for help. Unfortunately, these bridges will waste $1.2 billion according to the AP analysis.

So, according to the Vice President, projects that are wasteful because they were not competitively bid, projects that are unneeded because there is nothing wrong with the bridges, and projects that are wrongfully granted money because they do not meet the criteria are a "success beyond expectations." He sure has a funny definition of success.

As with yesterday, let's do some math:

• The stimulus will spend $787,000,000,000 which means the American taxpayer will have to fork over $787,000,000,000 of their hard earned money at some point in time to pay for it.
• A billion dollars is a lot of money. If you spent a thousand dollars a day from the day Christ was born, you still would not have spent a billion dollars. Thing about it, most of us could live quite comfortably on a thousand dollars a day, particularly hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
• Since there are about 130 million households in the United States, if the $787,000,000,000 had been spread out over each household, every family would have gotten a check for about $6,000 (as opposed to the tax break of only $400-$800 they actually got). Thus, rather than waste money on strong bridges, bad youth job training programs (see yesterday's post), stupid and inefficient rebate programs ("Cash For Clunkers"), wasteful military construction projects, bank bailouts, government agency bailouts (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and other useless expenditures, I contend that giving every family $6,000 would have immediately stimulated the economy. We would likely have seen car sales jump, home foreclosures slow, consumer expenditures increase creating youth job opportunities and whole bunch of good economic stuff happen in a free and efficient way. Hey, we as taxpayers are going to have to pay the bill for the stimulus, we should at least get the benefit.