Alabama has received 3 billion dollars of stimulus aid to help “save or create” jobs and cure unemployment. Yet somehow that stimulus aid isn’t helping in curing unemployment or creating new jobs, instead it’s resulting in a state unemployment rate that’s higher than the national unemployment rate of 10.2 percent.
Here’s an illustration of the stimulus creating jobs in Alabama:
The Fort Payne Housing Authority this year got a $540,071 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and mistakenly reported in early October that the stimulus grant would create 7,280 jobs, authority director Pamela E. Darwin said Monday…Actually, the grant to reroof 154 apartments owned by the authority has created 14 jobs, Darwin said, adding that someone at the authority meant to type on a federal survey that the grant would create 7,280 hours of work, not jobs.
But the Obama administration omitted that report from their October 30 statement that the stimulus had created 640,329 jobs. The sham didn’t stop there:
Besides the Fort Payne Housing Authority, the board in the report cited by ABC News said the national job count also omitted job reports from Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa and from Talladega County.
Worse, other job sector reports showed similarly dismal results:
Though White House officials are boasting that the stimulus package has created or saved 325,000 education jobs nationwide, that only amounts to 841 in Alabama, according to a newly released report…..State officials estimated in the spring that the $1 billion Alabama schools expected as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would save about 3,790 jobs. But local officials have been cautious about using the money on salaries because of something known as the “spending cliff.”
With Alabama suffering from over 10.2 percent unemployment, and one of the most precipitous increases in state unemployment rates since September, its people are left wondering what benefit the stimulus package has provided.
David Weinberger currently is a member of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit: http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm