Democratic Districts Receive Twice as Much 'Stimulus' as GOP Districts

[Confederate Kahanist]

http://action.afa.net/Blogs/BlogPost.aspx?id=2147490362

According to a report in The Washington Examiner this week, a new analysis of the Reinvestment and Recovery Act (known simply as the stimulus bill) reveals that the funds were distributed without any concern for which states were most in need of jobs.

Veronique de Rugy, a scholar at the Mercatus Center who produced the analysis, said "You would think that if the stimulus money was actually spent to create jobs, there would be more stimulus money spend in high unemployment states.  But we don't find any correlation."

    The Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia is one of the nation's most respected economic and regulatory think tanks and has a Nobel prize-winning economist on staff. The econometric analysis was done using data provided by Recovery.gov -- the government website devoted to tracking the stimulus data -- as well as a host of other government databases.

    Additionally, Mercatus found that stimulus funds were not disbursed geographically with any special regard for low-income Americans. “We find no correlation between economic indicators and stimulus funding. Preliminary results find no statistically significant effect of unemployment, median income or mean income on stimulus funds allocation,” said the report.

Here's the biggest piece of  news in the entire article:  the Mercatus Center found that Democratic congressional districts received on average almost double the amount of money as Republican congressional districts.  Republicans districts received around $232 million in stimulus funds and Democratic districts got $439 million.

“We found that there is a correlation [relating to the partisanship of congressional districts],” de Rugy said.  Her investigation revealed that stimulus funds are expected to decrease by 24.19 percent if a district is represented by a Republican.

Of course, it is not surprising to hear that Democrats received more money just by virtue of the fact that they control Congress, and thus appropriations, but de Rugy says " . . . in this case a lot of the money we're looking at is going through HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development], or Department of Education, Department of Transportation etc. and they're following a formula.  But the correlation exists, and not only does it exist -- when you look at how much money we're talking about, it's a pretty big deal.”