Paybacks for Democratic Campaign Supporters
Veronique de Rugy and Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University decided to take a look at how the “stimulus” dollars were spent. They were able to track only $157 billion dollars from publicly available reports. The rest of the spending is untrackable due to lack of government transparency.
They analyzed data from Recovery.gov and to assure readers regarding the quality and objectivity of their analysis, they published all of their data in their Stimulus Facts report.
The report data can be summarized in these two sentences, “We found no correlation between economic indicators and stimulus funding. Preliminary results find no effect of unemployment, median income, or mean income on stimulus funds allocation.”
In other words, the parts of the country that needed more money didn’t get more money, and the “stimulus” funds were allocated by some criteria other than need.
So what criteria was used to determine who received all of those “free” tax dollars? The report provides a very clear answer, “Democratic districts received 1.89 times more stimulus dollars than Republican districts. The average dollars awarded per Republican district is $232,047,857, while the average dollars awarded per Democratic district is $439,200,100. In total, Democratic districts received 73.47 percent of the total stimulus funds awarded. ”
As we predicted before the bill passed, the “stimulus” funds were used for pork barrel projects and to provide kickbacks for campaign supporters.
But maybe the stimulus dollars were well spent anyway? Maybe we shouldn’t focus on the fact that the Democratic Congress ignored unemployment and income in their decision making process. How well did they spend our grandchildren’s money? Another quote from the report provides that answer, “The number of jobs claimed as created or saved is 638,826.54—an average of $245,807.51 per job.”
The facts are in. The Democratic Congress stole a trillion taxpayer dollars and used it to reward their campaign contributors and improve their odds of being re-elected in 2010. The only question now is what are we going to do about it?
