Daily Dose of Common Sense

CNN is doing a week-long series on surprising ways your stimulus dollars are being spent. Not hard to imagine that most of what will be uncovered won’t make the taxpayers happy.

For example, in Ohio, $1 million of their stimulus dollars (that you gave them) is being spent just to tell you that they are spending stimulus dollars.

Ohio was given nearly $1 billion of stimulus money for roadwork. The money used for the signs is only about one-tenth of 1 percent of that money.

But critics argue that stimulus money — all of it — was designed to finance projects, not advertise them.

It’s crazy. And, Ohio isn’t the only state creating signs to let citizens know that stimulus money is being used for certain projects. It’s estimated that $3.8 million will be spent on signs nationwide. (Guess we should all be in the sign business.)

There are some 16 states, however, who are doing it right and skipping the signs. Vermont, for example, allows taxpayers to track their state’s stimulus funds via a Web site.

Some of these politicians don’t get it. Who needs signs? We want jobs and a strong economy. Stop wasting our money!

Photo
[Via Consumerist.com]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.