Why Obama’s Stimulus Failed: A Case Study of Silver Spring, Maryland

High, persistent unemployment and a sluggish economy underscore what all but the most-dedicated supporters of Barack Obama know to be true: The president’s 2009 stimulus program was a massively expensive bust.

Understanding why the stimulus failed is an important step in understanding how the government can—and cannot—goose economic recovery. To get a better sense of how and where the stimulus went wrong, Reason.tv focused on Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that’s home to a large number of government contractors and other recipients of money earmarked for the sorts of “shovel ready” projects that were going to bring the economy back to life.

President Obama’s top economic advisor Larry Summers laid out ground rules for how stimulus dollars should be spent: The funds must be “targeted” at resources idled by the recession, the interventions must be “temporary,” and they needed to “timely,” or injected quickly into the economy.
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Why Obama’s Stimulus Failed: A Case Study of Silver Spring, Maryland”


GM Exec: Reporting GM’s Failures Hurts… Republicans?

-By Warner Todd Huston

In an odd turn of events, former GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz thinks that anyone that criticizes GM is not only “mis-informed” but insists that those “foaming ideologues” that criticize the car giant are “damaging the Republican Party.”

It is interesting that an executive in the company derided as “Government Motors” is trying to direct attention away from his minders in the Obama administration and toward the opposing party, and just before a general election at that.

It is also interesting to see Lutz defending GM as the “future” of the car business. Lately GM has not been turning out the sort of products that puts the company at the head of much of anything.
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GM Exec: Reporting GM’s Failures Hurts… Republicans?”


Schools Snub Obama’s Speaking Contest

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last year 1,000 high schools competed to win the chance to have President Obama attend their graduation exercises. But this year, the White House is scrambling to understand why only 68 schools have applied for the honor.

The Political Hotsheet blog at CBSNews tells us that internal memos are flummoxed as to why so few schools have applied for the competition for this year’s graduation.

The competition was extended from the February 25 deadline until Friday, March 11 after few schools met the original application deadline. CBS News has learned a White House Communications Office internal memo dated February 22 noted “a major issue with the Commencement Challenge.”

“As of yesterday we had received 14 applications and the deadline is Friday,” the memo said. The memo also urged recipients to, “please keep the application number close hold.”

A follow-up memo on February 28 reported receipt of 68 applications. Noting the competition among more than 1,000 schools last year, the memo said, “Something isn’t working.” It called on staffers to ask “friendly congressional, gubernatorial and mayoral offices” to encourage schools to apply.

After the news of the White House struggling to get applicants got out, the White House would not respond to further questions on just how many applications had been received by Monday, March 7.
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Schools Snub Obama’s Speaking Contest”


Oops. Obama’s ‘Saved Job’ Was Just Lost

-By Warner Todd Huston

Oh, it was a thing to be celebrated when Obama’s payoff to the teachers unions back in August “saved” the job of Ohio school teacher Amanda VanNess. It was such a thing of wonder that the big guy flew the elementary school teacher all the way to D.C. for an Oval Office signing ceremony.

(Pictured: President Obama signed a bill in August aimed at saving teachers’ jobs, with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Council of Economic Advisers chief Christina Romer and teacher Amanda Van Ness on hand. Getty Images)

Happy days were here again… and it lasted less than three months because VanNess still lost her job this month anyway.

But there is good news. VanNess’s job only cost the American people $26 billion dollars. So we have that going for us, which is nice.
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Oops. Obama’s ‘Saved Job’ Was Just Lost”


$20 Mil Wasted on Obama Propaganda Signs

All hail the Obammessiah, the savior of our jobs… well, at least $20 million went to a few sign makers so that Obama could pretend that he saved folk’s jobs, anyway.

You can help shine a light on this wasteful federal spending by taking a photo of an Obama propaganda sign on the side of the road telling us all of Obama’s benevolence and sending it to the House Republicans via this address: stimulussigns@mail.house.gov.


That Stimulating Stimulus Paid for Homemade Porno?

-By Warner Todd Huston


Well if this isn’t a fitting addition to the story of the stimulus what is? The University of Notre Dame in Indiana recently fired an electrical engineering professor over allegations that the prof used $190,000 in federal grant money and matching university funds to buy cameras and other equipment to make homemade porno.

Like a true hair-splitting academic, professor Oliver M. Collins is fighting his firing claiming that the university has no proof that he was the one that made the pornographic images that the university found stored on his university-owned computer. That’s right, he is clueless on how all those porn images got on his computer. Just clueless! And all those cameras he bought with the school’s money? Um… well… he’s going to take up bird watching… maybe?

Collins has filed a lawsuit claiming that the university owes him more than $75,000 in damages. But Collins was later heard telling university officials, “Hey, nice economic package you have there.” But I jest.
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That Stimulating Stimulus Paid for Homemade Porno?”


Cash For Clunkers Hurting Lower Class Car Buyers

-By Warner Todd Huston

In yet another see-I-told-you-so moment, Obama’s cash for clunkers program is now hurting lower income folks who wish to buy used cars by driving costs up an average of $1,800 above what used car prices were at this time last year.

In August of 2009 I wrote that Obama’s cash for clunkers program would “soon be materially hurting the lower middle classes” that aren’t rich enough to buy new cars. With the rule that the cars turned in under the clunkers program had to be destroyed many thousands of good, serviceable used cars were summarily removed from the used market. Fewer cars on the used market means the ones that are left will see higher prices. It’s a simple supply and demand principle here. Apparently Obama was blissfully unaware of such a simple truth.

Now a report on Edmunds Daily, a car shopping advice service website, is saying that used car buyers are seeing an average of $1,800 more on their purchases. On larger-sized autos it’s even higher.

So middle and lower class Americans are almost $2,000 behind before they even decide to try and buy a used car.
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Cash For Clunkers Hurting Lower Class Car Buyers”


Congress’ Spending FAIL Map

-By Warner Todd Huston

Want to know a few of the outrageous wastes of the taxpayer’s money as funded by Obama’s so-called stimulus that happened in your state?

Check out the Bankrupting America Spending FAIL map to see if your state got and wasted some of this “free” cash.

Not every state is yet represented on the map, but you can click around and see some of the vast waste of money across the country that the Obama stimulus went to fund.

The map is sponsored by BankruptingAmerica.org.

And here is their hilarious video showing the sort of waste we are getting out of the “stimulus.”


Ohio’s Dem. Gov. Gave Stimulus $$ to Co. That Exported Jobs to El Salvador

-By Warner Todd Huston

What was it that Democrat President Barack Obama told us about the stimulus? Oh, yeah that it would “save or create” American jobs. Seems like a good idea, right? So what happened in Ohio when Democrat Governor Ted Strickland got his mitts on some of Obama’s stimulus cash? Why he gave it to a company to fund a call center that is operating out of El Salvador, Central America, of course.

Jobs for Americans? Heck no, jobs for El Salvadorans! And why? Because it was a good deal, you see?

Earlier this year Governor Strickland’s Department of Development awarded a $171,300 contract to a company named Parago. This company was hired by the state to operate a call center that Ohio residents can call to take advantage of a rebate program that the state set up so that Buckeyes could buy new household appliances and get a little sumpthin’ back.

Apparently everything was going wonderfully for most of this year until one Ohio resident happened to ask one of the El Salvadoran phone jockeys where the call center was at which they were taking the calls. When the Buckeye was told Central America, said resident became incensed that federal “stimulus” money was going to fund jobs in El Salvador instead of in the United States — like Obama promised it would.
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Ohio’s Dem. Gov. Gave Stimulus $$ to Co. That Exported Jobs to El Salvador”


Video: Ignoramus Democrat Says The More we Borrow the Richer we Get

-By Warner Todd Huston

Idiot Pete Stark (D, Calif.) says that the more we borrow as a nation the “richer” we get. You see, says Congressman Stark Raving, that trillions of dollars in debt proves that we are a rich people.

“If YOU’D SHUT UP,” Stark says we might be able to appreciate his genius. And if the guy that was trying to interview Congressman Stake Raving would “Get the fu*k outta here,” maybe we could all have benefited from Congressman Stark Raving’s perspicacity.

Just watch this and see why Democrats can’t be trusted to do… well, anything…

Wow, what a distempered half-wit Representative Stark Raving is.

Sadly, I see nothing to separate Rep. Stark Raving from any other Democrat. This video is pretty prosaic, really. This sort of economic ignorance piled on top of such arrogance is the Democrat Party personified.
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Video: Ignoramus Democrat Says The More we Borrow the Richer we Get”


Obama Says Stimulus Worked, Created Jobs… Here’s a Reminder of the Waste

-By Warner Todd Huston

In his recent trip to Racine, Wisconsin, President Obama claimed that his stimulus policies worked and “saved jobs.” He also said that his policies staved off another Great Depression. But lets take a look at some of the graft, waste and pointless, useless, wild-eyed spending that was in his so-called stimulus.

  • $5 million to create a geothermal energy system for a shopping mall in Tennessee. The mall is over half empty of tenants and has had falling shopper attendance for years *
  • $1.57 million to Penn State University study fossils in Argentina *
  • $100,000 to a puppet theater in Minnesota *
  • $2 million to build a replica railroad tourist trap in Carson City, Nev. *
  • A boat cruise company in Chicago got almost $1 million to “combat terrorism” *
  • $500,000 went to Ariz. State Univ. to study ant genetics *
  • Another $450,000 went to Uinv. of Arizona to study ants *
  • Almost $400,000 went to Univ. of New York to pay students to drink beer and smoke marijuana for a study there *
  • $219,000 went to the Nat’l Institute of Health to study if young people “hook-up” after getting drunk *
  • $210,000 to the Univ. of Hawaii to study bees *
  • $700,000 to crab fishermen in Oregon to pay for lost crab pots *
  • $5,000 a person tax rebate if you buy a new electric golf cart (Wall Street Journal)
  • Up to $1 million went to prisoners in $250 stimulus checks (FoxNews)
  • $54 mil to a New York Indian tribe to run its casino (New York Post)
  • $1 billion for a power plant in Mattoon, Illinois that is based on speculative science and may not even work **
  • $15 million to back-road bridges that get little traffic in Wisconsin **
  • $800,000 for a practically unused airport in Pennsylvania **
  • $3.4 million for an animal walk way under a road in Florida **
  • $1.15 million to install a guard rail for a lake that doesn’t even exist in Oklahoma **
  • $10 million to renovate a rail station that has stood unused for a decade **
  • $578,000 to battle homelessness in Union, New York even though the town says they have no homeless people there **
  • $233,000 to the Univ. of Calif. to study why Africans vote… in Africa ***
  • $2 million to build a new fire house in a Nevada town that has no firemen ***
  • North Carolina schools got $4.4 million for literacy and math coaches… to teach their teachers! ***
  • $54 million for a railroad project in Napa Valley went to a minority-owned company that then hired a local construction company for half the price, pocketing the rest ***
  • A California company was given $15 million in stimulus money to monitor water quality in a stream it was under indictment for polluting previously***

Well, obviously this is just a tiny list of the graft, waste, and useless spending in Obama’s so-called stimulus bill but it serves to illustrate the fact that stimulating the economy was far from the minds of those congressmen that voted for the bill. It was more about paying off constituents than stimulating the economy.

Source unless noted: * = The Hill. ** = Americans for Tax Reform, *** = Fox News.
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Obama Says Stimulus Worked, Created Jobs… Here’s a Reminder of the Waste”


Fiscal Responsibility Lasted Two Weeks In Senate

-By Warner Todd Huston

Two weeks ago the U.S. Senate passed new rules that would require new spending to be offset somewhere else in the budget, the so-called paygo rule. They did this because Democrats and Obama got tired of being called big spending socialists and wanted the veneer of fiscal responsibility with which to cloak themselves. It lasted two weeks before the Senate broke its own new Obama-sponsored rule and went headlong for just another big spending program with its supposed jobs bill.

On February 13 President Obama celebrated the paygo rule as a “common sense” rule that would “rein in spending.” Obama then said that the new rule would assure that Congress would be forced to “pay for what it spends, just like everybody else.”

It all sounds so grand. But it wasn’t to last. Maybe that’s why the Senate couldn’t abide by the rule, it was too much “common sense” for them to put up with?
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Fiscal Responsibility Lasted Two Weeks In Senate”


$135 Million of Your Money Wasted on ‘Green Wall’ In Oregon

-By Warner Todd Huston

About $135 million of our tax dollars in federal stimulus is being wasted on an upgrade for the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in Portland, Oregon, one aspect of which is the so-called “green wall.” Why wasted? Because no one even knows if this “green wall” will even work and no engineering solutions have been found to make it work. Many say the whole thing is impracticable.

The Associated Press starts its report on this project with a skeptical tone and if Obama’s stimulus project has lost the AP, he’s in deep trouble. “They haven’t figured out yet how to get the pruning done,” the AP begins, “but architects and federal officials plan one of the world’s most extensive vertical gardens in downtown Portland — what amounts to a series of 250-foot-tall trellises designed to shade the west side of an 18-story office building.”

The idea is to have the entire western wall of this building affixed with a trellis that will have planters for greenery in them. These “vegetated fins” are supposed to help the building better regulate its internal environment and use less energy to heat and cool.

The big problem is, though, no one has any idea if the concept will actually work as advertised. Not only that, but no one knows if all this vegetation will even stay alive. On top of it all, there is no real certainty that building operators will be able to even water all these thousands of yards of plants.
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$135 Million of Your Money Wasted on ‘Green Wall’ In Oregon”


Obama The Pro-Gun President?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Is President Obama a surprising gun rights supporter? He might be if the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman is correct. And Chapman isn’t the only one. It seems to be shaping up to be the lefty complaint du jour this week. Reality, however, might say something different.

Chapman makes a classic mistake that many people make when discussing matters political. He mistakes Washington’s inaction on an issue as some sort of statement on the ideology on that issue. While there are times when this is true, inaction is not necessarily a statement of support or opposition to an issue, but often just a matter of merely not having gotten to it yet or even not being able to.

In this case Chapman is talking about guns. Is Obama for them, against them, indifferent to them? Chapman has a sneaking suspicion that President Obama is for our rights and only supports modest gun control measures. This is because the president hasn’t launched into all sorts of left-wing attempts to curtail our Second Amendment rights in his one year in office. But I think Chapman is reading too much into Obama’s inaction.
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Obama The Pro-Gun President?”


Mr. Freeze? Hardly. The Fake Spending “Restraint” of Obama

-By Ryan Ellis, Americans for Tax Reform

The political media is awash in news that President Obama will propose a freeze in non-defense, non-security discretionary spending over the next three years. This will reduce the spending baseline by $250 billion over the next decade.

A few thoughts:

1. Welcome to the fiscal responsibility party, Mr. President. After a year of trillion-dollar bailouts, trillion-dollar stimulus bills, and trillion-dollar healthcare plans, it’s nice to see at least a rhetorical nod toward sanity coming out of the White House.
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Mr. Freeze? Hardly. The Fake Spending “Restraint” of Obama”


Do you Believe in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Stimulus?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Christmas for adults is never quite the same as Christmas for the under 12-year-old set. Not that it’s all bad if you are an adult, it’s just that it takes a different form for adults. For kids it’s all about the magic of Santa Claus. When you believe it all seems so wondrous. This blindly, uninformed reliance on mere belief is a perfect definition of the Democrat voter.

As an adult, of course, a lot of what many of us see during Christmas are the mounting bills for gifts, growing credit card debt, and draining bank accounts. It always makes for a bit of a dark cloud for which the silver lining is a day with family, the bright smiling faces of our kids on Christmas morning, and a celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus.

Recently I was reflecting on this Christmas reality trying to apply it as a metaphor for Obama’s wasted stimulus money. But, soon I realized that the only similarities between believing in Santa and believing in the stimulus is the fact that they are both a fantasy. Sadly, whereas Christmas offers much that is wonderful (despite that the bills will come due) the stimulus has no such silver lining… unless you are a Democrat politician needing votes because a vote getting device is all the stimulus really was.
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Do you Believe in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Stimulus?”


Charlie Crist: A Serving of Pork Sounds Good

-By Warner Todd Huston

On November 11, I wrote of the statements that Charlie Crist made denying that he ever supported Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill in his role as Florida’s Governor. Unfortunately for his obfuscation, though, I noted that he and 17 other governors signed a letter in February of this year announcing support for the Stimulus. Apparently Crist forgot that he signed this letter… conveniently. Yes, he was for the porkulus bill before he was against it.

Well now there is even more proof than that mere signature on a piece of paper showing Charlie’s support for the porkulus bill. From Ed Morrissey we find an interview that Rolling Stone hackster Tim Dickinson did with Crist back in the spring. In that piece Dickinson was celebratory that Crist was a stimulus supporter.

Dickinson then noted, “For his part, Crist is weighing a run for the Senate — where, he tells Rolling Stone, he would have given the president a fourth Republican vote on the stimulus bill.”
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Charlie Crist: A Serving of Pork Sounds Good”


Gov. Crist DID Flip Flop on Stimulus Support

-By Warner Todd Huston

On November 5 on CNN, Florida Governor Charlie Crist told Wolf Blitzer that he didn’t back the $787 billion Obama stimulus bill. Crist has since said that it isn’t a flip flop when he says he supported the stimulus “in concept” but didn’t support the specific bill.

In essence he’s trying to have it both ways. Claiming he wasn’t a supporter of the actual bill, but hedging by saying he felt something was necessary. It seems to be Crist’s way of straddling the line.

Unfortunately, the facts seem to belie Crist’s delicately balanced tightrope act because in February of 2009 Crist was one of 18 U.S. governors (along with the governor of the Virgin Islands) that signed a letter informing President Obama that they supported the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). (See pdf of letter here)

Despite being a signatory of the letter Crist is now saying he didn’t support the specific stimulus bill. After speaking at the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Crist told the press, ““I think the question posed to me was, ‘Did you endorse this specific bill?’ And I said, ‘No, I didn’t,’ but the concept I thought, and still believe, was important, necessary and it helped Florida.”
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Gov. Crist DID Flip Flop on Stimulus Support”


$15 Million Stimulus Spent for 1,095 Canadian Tourists in Montana

-By Warner Todd Huston

What is the cost of three Canadian visitors a day? Fifteen million dollars in Obamabucks, apparently. Worse, this waste of money wasn’t something the president of “transparency” seemed disposed to let us easily discover. Still, the Boston Globe reports that $15 mil is the amount of so-called stimulus money that Obama allowed to be spent by the state of Montana on a tiny border check-point facility that sees about three visitors a day — that’s $14,000,000 per tourist for the year.

Despite Obama’s promises that the stimulus plan would be transparent and free of politics, the government is handing out $720 million for border upgrades under a process that is both secretive and susceptible to political influence. This allowed low-priority projects such as the checkpoint in Whitetail, Mont., to skip ahead of more pressing concerns, according to documents revealed to the Associated Press.

Obama claimed he’d be “different,” though. Remember that he was supposed to be the serious president that only did the right thing? Yet, he’s turned his back on any sort of effort to hold stimulus spending to account. Projects all across the country are being given to less needy government facilities instead of going where need is greatest because of the influence brought to bear on distribution of funds by powerful politicians.
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$15 Million Stimulus Spent for 1,095 Canadian Tourists in Montana”


Obama’s Stimulus a Farce in New Hampshire

-By Warner Todd Huston

One of the first states to attempt to tally the “new jobs” that Obama’s stimulus created has issued its first report and the news is rather discreditable to say the least. New Hampshire’s Director of the Economic Stimulus, Bud Fitch, recently put out his report and he is asserting that the stimulus “saved” or created 796 jobs in all of the state. Naturally 700 of those jobs were government jobs.

New Hampshire Public Radio interviewed economist Brian Gottlob who warned that the supposed 700 jobs saved, nearly all were in education, were probably not jobs on the chopping block in the first place. So to say that these jobs were “saved” is a bit absurd.

Gottlob says that few of these jobs in education would have been cut because the budgets would have been found to keep them stimulus or no. It is infrequent that state jobs in education have been cut in the past, according to Gottlob, so to say that the stimulus “saved” these jobs is not very credible.
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Obama’s Stimulus a Farce in New Hampshire”


Obama’s ‘Jobs-Saved’ Claims Flat Out Untrue

-By Warner Todd Huston

On CNBC, Tony Fratto, former White House Spokesman for President Bush, has used the nice word — that would be “deception” — to say that Barack Obama is lying about his claims that his “stimulus” efforts saved any American jobs. Not only does Fratto devastate the administration’s claims to have saved jobs, but he rightfully points out that the lapdog media is letting Obama get away with the deceit.

Fratto calls the jobs-saved rhetoric a “breathtaking deception” and is aghast at the “gullibility of the Washington press corps” for reporting Obama’s claims with a straight face and an un-skeptical eye.

Oh, it isn’t that the numbers that Obama uses to make his claims are somewhat jiggured, but that the whole claim is impossible to figure all the way around and Obama’s economic team knows it, according to Fratto. The claim is simply a fiction, a fantasy, a claim made based on no numbers and no ability to find them.

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Obama’s ‘Jobs-Saved’ Claims Flat Out Untrue”


Hope and Mirrors: Stimulus ‘Saved’ Cops To Be Fired Anyway

-By Warner Todd Huston

On March 6, Obama’s mouthpiece, Robert Gibbs, happily told the nation that the Obama “stimulus” plan had saved the jobs of 25 Cops in Columbus, Ohio. This was an example, Gibbs trumpeted, of how Obama’s supposed stimulus package was “working” to set the country to rights. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder even took a road trip to Columbus to proudly see these “saved” cops being sworn in as police officers.

It was back slaps and grins all around as Obama celebrated his successful “stimulus” program. That was less than two months ago. Today, those same 25 new policemen whose jobs were “saved” by the great father in Washington have been laid off over lack of funds.

Obama’s great hope and mirrors campaign strikes its false stance as savior again, proving that there was no “stimulus” in the stimulus plan and that it was a false front all along meant only to serve as a part of Obama’s permanent political campaign effort. In reality, there’s just no there, there.

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Hope and Mirrors: Stimulus ‘Saved’ Cops To Be Fired Anyway”


An Example of Obama’s ‘Stimulus’ That Isn’t

-By Warner Todd Huston

If we need no other example of why government can’t “stimulate” an economy, we have but to look at the use to which the city of Akron, Ohio wants to put some of its “stimulus” money. Akron, it seems, wants to spend some of that money for suicide prevention. Oh, not a general suicide prevention program that might at least employ people. No, Akron wants to build a fence on a bridge that seems to emit a siren call for jumpers to prevent them from killing themselves.

Akron’s All-American Bridge, a “Y” shaped structure that serves as a main artery into the city, has been a platform for suicide jumpers for so long now that area residents have nicknamed it the suicide bridge. Consequently, city officials have proposed using more than one million dollars of the city’s “stimulus” money to erect a fence that will help prevent people from being able to use the span as a means to an end.

Sure it might be a good idea. Who the heck wants citizens constantly plummeting to their deaths from the thing? But, is this something that will “stimulate” the local economy? The only possible answer is a resounding “no.”

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An Example of Obama’s ‘Stimulus’ That Isn’t”