Stimulus Web site plays games with numbers

Remember, back in February, when Congress and President Obama decided to blow $787 billion taxpayer dollars on “recovery” and economic “stimulation”? Ever wonder just what, exactly, happened to all of that money?

Well, $18 million of it went to the creation of a website, www.recovery.gov, where all of that information has now been sifted, sorted, analyzed, compiled, massaged and arranged in pretty little rows just for your perusal. Have no fears, comrades, for spending transparency has arrived at last.

Under the “State/Territory Summaries” selection, for example, you can select a given state, then choose the option to “View all congressional districts” for a breakdown of the number of jobs created in any given district. If you select Arizona, for instance, you can see that there were 30 jobs created in that state’s 15th congressional district. There’s only one problem: Arizona, being limited to eight congressional districts, doesn’t have a 15th district.

And if you select California, you will discover that there were four jobs created in the 57th district, 4.6 jobs in the 64th and one job in the 99th. There’s only three problems: California, being limited to 53 congressional districts, doesn’t have a 57th, 64th or 99th district.

So, where do these dreamed-up districts come from? Your guess is as good as mine—but it’s probably going to be a better guess, I would reckon, than that of this website’s $18 million webmaster. At least if you live in Arizona or California.

And if you think those are isolated examples, you’ve got another think coming: As reported by ABC News, there’s been a total of $6.4 billion spent to create more than 30,000 jobs in 440 congressional districts that are so “transparent” they don’t exist.

And how, you might wonder, does the White House refer to these statistical shenanigans? Edward DeSeve, special advisor to the president, on the www.whitehouse.gov, calls it a “huge success,” and goes on to state that the mistakes, while possibly adding up to “5-10 percent of the total,” don’t really “undermine information at the heart of the data” because most of them are the result of “typos and coding errors.”

Is this guy for real? Try telling your bank that you bounced all your checks because your arithmetic was “5-10 percent” off due to “coding errors” and see if they’ll cover them for you. Now that would be a “huge success.”

And isn’t it funny that there are no reports of deflated data, only inflated data? One would expect, after all, in the normally muddled and incompetent scheme of things, just as many bogus minus signs as bogus plus signs—but that doesn’t appear to be the case. So much for “typos and coding errors."

The fact of the matter is that the “stimulus” package, the alleged goal of which was to create millions of jobs, has been an utter failure, and the Obama administration is clutching at every possibly straw—including phony cook-the-data straws—to try and hide that fact.

That such is the case is obvious to anyone at even a cursory glance: for dollars that have been looted from the taxpaying population, and then disbursed according to the dictates of pork-barrel politics, will never generate the kind of return they would have achieved if left free to flow as they would have in the absence of the theft.

Sure, you can “create” a job by spending plundered loot: but what about the job that was lost, which nobody ever sees, because its creation was never funded by taxpayers spending or saving their money as they choose in the first place? Well, we just won’t mention that, will we? Like the shyster poker hustler who attracts the attention of his pushover patsies with an engaging smile as he deals the stack from the bottom of the deck, this administration is pointing to the limited examples of “stimulus” jobs here and there while ignoring and evading the reality of the (ever-increasing) areas of jobless wastelands in between.

And that, exactly, is the real tragedy here: not that we have been duped by an $18 million boondoggle in regard to a nearly $1 trillion spending spree, but that we have been made to swallow the myth that government manipulation of our money can ever create anything besides a constantly-widening spread of economic dislocation and disaster.

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Bradley Harrington is a former United States Marine and a free-lance writer who lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming.