Stimulus Fraud
The Bear on Nov 22 2009 at 9:15 am | Filed under: Culture of Corruption, Economy
The Economy: We knew something was funny when the White House claimed that 640,000 to 1 million jobs had been created from this year’s stimulus. What we didn’t know was that it would turn into a massive fraud.
Not only have 640,000 new jobs not been created from the stimulus — an absurd claim, given the economy’s loss of nearly 4 million payroll positions this year — but it now seems that even the jobs themselves are fictional.
Thanks to the digging of a number of data sleuths, it turns out that many of the jobs reported by states come from made-up congressional districts.
This would be funny if it weren’t a criminal waste of public funds. And yet, G. Edward DeSeve, who runs the government’s economic recovery program, says the errors are “relatively few” and “don’t change the fundamental conclusions one can draw from the data.”
Excuse us? The “relatively few” errors are in fact thousands in number. But that’s the pernicious place we find ourselves today — a public official defending shoddy accounting that looks an awful lot like fraud to the tune of billions of dollars.
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