Dick Tuck
Board Troll
- Aug 29, 2009
- 8,511
- 505
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It's Official: The Stimulus Isn't a Waste of Money
People of good faith can disagree over whether President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package is creating enough jobs, piling on too much debt or helping the country in the long run. But it's about time to retire one set of critiques of the stimulus: that it would be riddled with fraud, hamstrung by delays and crippled by cost overruns. So far, while the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is clearly not a political success, it is just as clearly a managerial success on schedule, under budget and, according to independent investigators, remarkably free of fraud.
On Sept. 30, the Administration met its self-imposed deadline of spending 70% of the Recovery Act funds, $551 billion, by the end of the fiscal year. Almost all of the unspent stimulus money is already committed to specific projects, except for a few longer-range initiatives like high-speed rail and electronic health records. And the completed work has cost less than expected, so the savings have financed more than 3,000 additional projects, from airport improvements in Atlanta to new child-care centers at military bases in Louisiana, North Carolina, Mississippi and Oklahoma, from a new five-lane road in Jacksonville, Fla., to a $14.5 million transformation of a World War II ammunition factory into an eco-friendly government building in St. Louis.
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On Sept. 30, the Administration met its self-imposed deadline of spending 70% of the Recovery Act funds, $551 billion, by the end of the fiscal year. Almost all of the unspent stimulus money is already committed to specific projects, except for a few longer-range initiatives like high-speed rail and electronic health records. And the completed work has cost less than expected, so the savings have financed more than 3,000 additional projects, from airport improvements in Atlanta to new child-care centers at military bases in Louisiana, North Carolina, Mississippi and Oklahoma, from a new five-lane road in Jacksonville, Fla., to a $14.5 million transformation of a World War II ammunition factory into an eco-friendly government building in St. Louis.
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