A rare post from Doug.

Since every other pundit is looking up their states and seeing where the Spendulus money went, I thought I would look up Iowa.

http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=stateSummaryAllCD&statecode=IA

(From Jody: it was pointed out to me that the above link, though it says it is the summary for the state of Iowa may be all states.  Which makes no sense as it would then need to verify which state the numbers come from.  And where is CD 00?  #FAIL)

(From Doug: no, this is supposed to be specifically for Iowa. Change the last 2 characters of the address to be the state code of your choice and watch the data change. I agree that the data is bogus on many levels, but it’s the only thing the administration has provided for us to see where almost a $trillion$ has gone. I am non-partisan about this. I blasted Bush for doing the same thing, even though it was on a much smaller scale. And it is my opinion that when McCain went back to Congress to lobby for the bailouts, he killed his election chances. )

First, it seems that Iowa has gained Congressional Districts! Now, instead of 5, we have 31 – so we have that going for us. Here’s the chart. I’ve taken the liberty of sorting it and providing some helpful summation.

IA Congressional Districts	Jobs	Amount $ Per Job	$ spent per job
00 congressional district	1	$112,336	$112,336
1st congressional district	235.2	$154,219,912	$655,697
2nd congressional district	200.5	$273,133,879	$1,362,264
3rd congressional district	3,299.20	$455,263,119	$137,992
4th congressional district	1,392	$480,953,374	$345,512
5th congressional district	157.3	$135,670,954	$862,498
7th congressional district	31	$254,864	$8,221
8th congressional district	0	$110,749	No jobs
16th congressional district	5	$5,696,743	$1,139,349
17th congressional district	0	$85,000	No jobs
19th congressional district	0	$4,146,802	No jobs
24th congressional district	2	$113,680	$56,840
31st congressional district	0	$48,000	No jobs
Totals:	5,323 jobs	$1,509,809,412
		Average $ per Job: $283,628

Gee, CD 3 (my district) only pays $138,000 per job. I’m moving to CD 2 where I can steal $1.3 million per job. Did I say steal? I meant take forcefully from your pocket. No, that sounds too close to the truth. How about, “spending Federal tax dollars to pay off favored special interest groups and campaign donors?”

Also, aside from the obvious phantom districts, it seems that the numbers of jobs “saved or created” include any temporary jobs and raises granted. Also, as I understand it, the forms used to gather this information makes it difficult to indicate zero jobs created/saved. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Iowa has a population of 3 million. That means that Spendulus paid around $500 per Iowan of any age or about $1,100 per household. That means that the Federal government had soooooooo extra much money to spend that they could afford to waste an average of $283,628 for 5,323 individuals rather than cut your taxes by $1,100 (per household).

Wait, did I say that the government has a lot of extra money? Well, only only because Uncle Sam hits the credit card pretty hard….and has a $12 Trillion credit card statement. Interesting, $4.4 Trillion of that was raided from the Social Security administration. It’s like borrowing from yourself, but it’s okay because you took it out of your LEFT pocket instead of your right and left an IOU. You’ll pay it back some day, really. I swear, this time I mean it! And it’s not like the Baby Boomers are all about to retire and start drawing SS benefits in unprecedented numbers or anything. I mean, that would just be silly to rob a retirement account just before it is going to be used. But it’s okay, because you have this IOU you left yourself and that is worth hard cash! You’ll just put that IOU into an annuity and the gravy-train awaits! Just imagine your life of receiving your IOU annuity back month-after-month – each month you would get a piece of paper saying that you have just been paid! No actual money of course, unless you get a job.

Jobs. Now there’s a cheery thought. Small businesses are doing their best to avoid hiring new people. Why? Well, because they don’t know if they can afford new employees next year. The nationalization of health care bill that just passed the House increases employment costs 8%-10% at a minimum. It could be more, depending on how many much extra has to be paid to the accountants and lawyers just to manage the boondoggle. If cap-and-tax gets passed then there is another 10%-25% increase. President Obama calls that increase “necessary”. It won’t help anyone except those that are politically favored, like GE and Al Gore, and helps the environment not-at-all. But that’s okay, because they mean well.

After all, you can’t be expected to manage your own affairs without some kind of Federal regulator, can you? That’s just silly. Next you’ll be asking the Fed to stay out of regulating the Internet. “Oh, but we need regulators to make sure the Internet is free from Government intervention!“. I’m still trying to figure that one out. It’s like saying, “you need to regulate me so that I have free speech!”

My trig course at ISU was easier to figure out. My professor was an English as a third or fourth language type and didn’t like to answer unscripted questions in class or during office hours. Kind of like that is what is going on now.

Update at 8:25 pm.  It looks like Recovery.gov has cleaned up their data. Now, all of the money previously assigned to bogus CDs, now go to “unassigned”.  Wow, who knew that an entire nation of bloggers and newspapers (both left and right) making fun of the data would get such a fast response?