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Posts Tagged ‘stimulus package’
December 12th, 2011 at 8:08 pm
Another Stimulus Boondoggle: $4.7 Billion in Broadband Spending Yields … Absolutely Nothing
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If you want to understand how comprehensively the Obama Administration has failed the nation, you need only begin with this point: as the president approaches the end of his first term, we’re still unearthing lurid details about his first major policy initiative, undertaken in his earliest days in office.

That plan, of course, was the $787 billion stimulus package that was supposed to kickstart economic growth (it didn’t) and keep unemployment under 8 percent (it’s never been that low in the nearly three years since the package was enacted).

Last week, I wrote about the case of a Maryland PR firm that got paid nearly a million dollars in stimulus money by the National Institutes of Health to promote how well the National Institutes of Health was spending stimulus money.

This week’s second verse of the same song is orders of magnitude worse; the dollar amount is in the billions and the outcome wasn’t just wasteful — it was non-existent. According to the Daily Caller:

As of the third quarter of 2011, no projects from the federal government’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) — a technology stimulus program funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) — have been completed…

The funds awarded for BTOP totaled over $4 billion, and the average award was $6,217,509, according to Recovery.gov.

Three years. Over $4 Billion. Zero results. This project may not have stimulated any growth in the broadband sector, but it’s certainly going to keep some Republican opposition researchers employed.

December 8th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
Feds Spending Stimulus Money to Tell the Public How Well They’re Spending Stimulus Money
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This one has to be read to be believed. Nearly three years after passage of the stimulus package, the horror stories of fiscal malpractice continue to emerge. From Reason:

Palladian Partners, a communications firm in Silver Spring, [Maryland has] received $97.5 million dollars in government contracts over the past 12 years. The National Insitutes of Health (NIH), which is Palladian’s biggest client, tacked $363,760 stimulus dollars on to an existing contract, and then followed it with two more awards totaling $431,333. Palladian was to spend the money collecting and disseminating information about how the NIH was spending stimulus money.

And what did NIH get for this money? According to the Reason piece, Palladian’s “main activities have included building a website, and publishing 29 short articles for the site.” That’s over $27,000 per article if you’re playing at home.

July 11th, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Video: Debunking Stimulus in a Few Easy Steps
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The incomparable Veronique de Rugy (Reason columnist and economist at the Mercatus Center) was recently a guest on Bloomberg TV, where she was tasked with rebutting the faulty economics behind the gigantic economic stimulus program that’s still holding back the American economy. As the video below shows, it was child’s play for this intellectually rigorous defender of free markets: