Your Tax Dollars Hard At Work Promoting Failed Policy

Wednesday, September 9, 2009 1:52 PM by Mattie Duppler

The latest story of “stimulus” waste requires a bit of creative logic to fully understand. It goes something like this: Pass legislation that claims to create jobs, then use money to advertise that it’s creating jobs instead of actually using the money to create more jobs. Sound like something out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that was promised to be administered “without waste, without inefficiency, without fraud?” You bet.

States are demanding that all road projects funded with “stimulus” funds have signs advertising this to their benefactors, the taxpayers. Little more than propaganda to support the administration’s “jobs saved or created” claim, these signs range from $1,000 to as much as $10,000 per project. Given that in Ohio alone there are 365 such projects and the “stimulus” sign is a phenomenon that is popping up in states across the country, the aggregated cost could be extraordinary.

Kristina Rasmussen of the Illinois Policy Institute pointed out that each dollar spent on these signs was a dollar not being spent on actual job creation – the supposed goal of the ill-designed “stimulus” plan. Her group filed a FOIA request to find out how much their state was spending on the stimulus advertisements and was denied because the IDOT claimed it simply didn’t know how much of taxpayers’ money was being misused to illustrate the President’s rhetoric.

Proponents of the signs claim that the signs are necessary to fulfill a pledge of transparency regarding the adjudication of “stimulus” money. However, if the individual state “stimulus” websites that are supposed to be tracking spending lived up to their goal of providing transparency, people would be able to easily access information on where their tax dollars were being spent without having to shell out extra money to do so. The placement of signs signals the failure to provide transparency in distributing “stimulus” funds, not an improvement towards doing so.

photo credit: Jeremy Brooks

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