Andrew Henson of the Civitas Institute reported on the impact of federal porkulus on North Carolina. The recovery was supposed to occur in the summer of 2010. The only major upswelling in jobs resulted from the hiring of Census workers, who have since been terminated. During the recovery, 938 businesses closed, “the overwhelming majority concentrated in manufacturing and construction industries.”
This was accomplished with, just for starters, “$6.5 billion in grants, $452 million in contracts, and $390 million in loans, reaching 5807 different recipients of stimulus funds across the state.” Billed as a job-creator, the ARRA spent a lot on making sure people don’t go to work:
What the federal stimulus did accomplish in our state, according to North Carolina’s recovery website, was to pay greater sums of Medicaid as well as dump money into a vast variety of programs such as Unemployment Insurance ($660 million), Social Security ($412 million), Food Stamps ($173 million), child care services ($56 million), and public housing ($84 million). It remains dubious how it was determined that saturating these welfare programs could result in creating new jobs. The stimulus even gave $344,000 for the promotion of the arts.
Disbursements, of course, were riddled with windows for waste, fraud, and abuse.
