Nov
5
(Un)Smart Power. Part II
Filed Under American Politics
The stimulus was supposed to help create jobs. But as Veronique de Rugy points out, if that was the intention of the stimulus, wouldn’t it make more sense to spend more money in states with higher unemployment and less in states with lower. seems like common sense to me. So there is no surprise then that unemployment is much higher than that forecasted by the Obama administration when they do things like this:
Yet, with a few exceptions, the data show that this is not the case. Many higher-unemployment states are getting far fewer stimulus dollars than lower-unemployment states.
Take Michigan, for instance. Michigan’s 15.2 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the country. So far, it has received $403 per person in stimulus funds. That’s above the average stimulus per person across all states ($326). However, it’s lower than the $409 per person that the state of Vermont, a state with relatively low unemployment (6.8 percent), has received so far. Michigan’s per-person take is also much lower than the $707 per person the District of Columbia received. D.C.’s unemployment rate is 9.9 percent.
Now look at the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the country: North Dakota. It’s getting $253 per person with a 4.3 percent unemployment rate. Many other states are receiving roughly the same amount of stimulus funds per person despite much higher rates of unemployment.
No wonder that in Virginia, when 47% of the voters listed the economy as their main concern, their vote went to the Republican by a 15% margin.
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3 Responses to “(Un)Smart Power. Part II”
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So there is no surprise then that unemployment is much higher than that forecasted by the Obama administration when they do things like this:
You might want to read a good book on the US Senate. Almost no legislation gets through the Senate without a guarantee that all goodies get spread proportionally to population not need. The same was true of post-9/11 funds where New York, an obvious target, was significantly underfunded compared to places like Fargo, ND.
ndm
Thankyou for the patronising. I’m wellaware of how the Senate works. but didn’t Obama promise to take a scalpel to budget matters rather than McCain’s sledge hammer. A particularly blunt scalpel in this case. And Obama is not exwmpt from the bad spending in the bill – he’s the one that signed it after all.
Presidents have only two choices with bills – sign them or veto them. They do not write the bills – that is the job of Congress. Presidents sign bills because getting 90% of what they want is often better than getting 0% of what they want.