While watching Fox News the other evening they gave the official web address for the so-called Recovery Act. If you haven’t been there yet, you can check it out at http://recovery.gov.  Unfortunately, parts of it have not been updated since  October 30, 2009.

The site lists Earl E. Devaney as the chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RAT Board), which manages the website and oversees spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  So who is Mr. Devaney? A search of the Internet lists Earl E. Devaney, as the inspector general for the Interior Department.  It states with 38 years of government service, Mr. Devaney, a hulking former college football lineman and Secret Service man was chosen by President Obama  to police the spending of the $787 billion so-called stimulus package.

According to the RAT website the funds have created or saved 640,329 jobs at a total expenditure of $158,750,000,000. Even if you believe their claims, this equates to an expenditure of $247,849.15 per job.  Another web search revealed that the most recent Gross National (per capita) annual income for the United States is $33,070.30 per person.  So using that figure they spent nearly 7-1/2 years of the average persons income to create or save one job.  That doesn’t sound like a good deal to me considering many of the newly created jobs are temporary construction or grant funded positions.

I took two states numbers to find out what their averages would be per job saved or created.  I chose the larger states of  California and Pennsylvania for this comparison.  What I found was even more disturbing.  California’s numbers are $18,534,840,000 awarded with 110,185 jobs.   The average per job is $168,215.63. At least better than the overall average numbers.

Pennsylvania’s  numbers are $4,527,780,000 awarded with a supposed 7427 jobs for a staggering average of $609,637.80 per job.  All I can say is, oh my God!

Further review of the RAT site though reveals of the $158, 750,000,000 awarded so far, only $36,689,000,00 of it has been received.  In other words, out of the $787 billion allocated by Congress in February of 2009, only about 20 percent has been awarded so far.  If the true intention was to spur the economy quickly, as stated, it would seem it should have all been issued by now. Otherwise what was the point?

That is the point. The real purpose of the RAT act was to reward special interest groups with huge sum of money at the taxpayers expense.  The reason I make this assertion is, of the total awarded so far, $139,377,946,601 of it has been in the form of grants.

I decided to look into a grant awarded in Pennsylvania for an example.  The Department of Education was selected with a random selection based on total awarded.  The Pennsylvania Department of Education was awarded $427,178,222  to assist  in providing special education and related services to children with disabilities in accordance with Part B of the IDEA.  In this particular case it lists only 48.93 jobs created or saved.  Or $8,730,394.89 per job.

I next decided to look at my own home town and school district to see what if any benefit we got locally. Did it boost our local job rate for example?  I found the Housing Authority of Republic, Missouri received a grant for $76,644.00 for the installation of hot water heaters.  The number of jobs created is listed as a whopping 0.04.

The Republic School District received four grants  for a total of $3,711,494.00.  As far as the jobs created or saved it lists zero.  At this point I decided I couldn’t take anymore and stopped looking.

The point of this post is simply that we the taxpayers have been sold down the river once again.  RAT has not stimulated our economy or created or saved a substantial number of jobs. The unemployment rate in fact has only risen since the passage of RAT.  With the majority of the money being awarded in the form of grants we will never get that money back so it just put us further in debt.   As with all government administered programs, the bureaucratic over site has delayed the issuance of the funds which has killed what if any boost to the economy it might have had.

The acronym RAT in fact seems very appropriate to me.  I don’t know about you, but I think I can smell a rat in this whole mess.  If this is the governments idea of recovery, they can keep it.