Tax cheats “received $24 billion in stimulus money despite failing to pay federal income taxes,” reports USA Today. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said legislation is needed to fix the problem. “That such a huge amount of the stimulus money went to known tax cheats should be a wake-up call for Congress,” he said.
Much stimulus money has been wasted. It has gone to prisoners and dead people, wasteful welfare spending, abandoned bridges to nowhere, and unnecessary government buildings. The stimulus subsidized foreign green jobs and wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.
After studying the details of the stimulus package, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron concluded that it was designed to reward politically connected “constituencies” and special-interest groups, rather than provide a boost to the economy.
The Washington Examiner earlier reported on how the Obama Administration has cited imaginary jobs in order to make the false claim that the $800 billion stimulus package cut unemployment. The Administration has cited jobs created in 440 non-existent Congressional districts, such as Arizona’s 15th and 86th districts (Arizona only had 8 Congressional districts, as ABC News noted with amusement). The Examiner noted that at least “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” Readers can view its interactive map of “Inflated Jobs by State.”
As the Examiner noted earlier, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.”
And the stimulus is just a drop in the bucket compared to other federal spending increases backed by the Obama Administration. Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise of a “net spending cut,” but soon after taking office, he proposed budgets that would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt and $1.9 trillion in new taxes.
