CNSNews.com - GOP Says Stimulus is ‘Dismal Failure,’ Only 1 Percent of Infrastructure Money Has Been Spent

CNSNews.com - GOP Says Stimulus is ‘Dismal Failure,’ Only 1 Percent of Infrastructure Money Has Been Spent

Washington (CNSNews.com) - In a press conference Friday, several Republican members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee criticized the $787-billion economic stimulus package passed earlier this year, saying that it had failed to create jobs and failed, in particular, to build new transportation infrastructure.



The Republicans also noted a recently issued Department of Transportation report that detailed how little stimulus money had been spent on infrastructure, despite the plan becoming law in February, six months ago.

Led by Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), the ranking Republican on the committee, the congressmen took turns lambasting the slow disbursement of funds in front of a backdrop that included a giant road work sign literally covered in red tape.

“The report we got from the Department of Transportation is dated July 3rd,” said Mica at the Capitol Hill press conference. “It indicates how much money of the $48 billion [allocated to the Transportation Department] they have control over has gone out -- that’s $523 million – 1 percent, approximately 1 percent. And the top 10 states of unemployment, our leading states, including the District of Columbia, only $83 million has gone out to those states.”

“This stimulus package was sold to the country as being an infrastructure bill,” said Rep. John ‘Jimmy’ Duncan (R-Tenn.), “and yet only somewhere between 7 and 8 percent of it was aimed at or provided for infrastructure in the first place.”

“And then, as others have said, only 1 percent has been spent,” Duncan said, “and in my state, Tennessee, $3.3 million, a little over three million dollars in the entire state of Tennessee is all that’s been spent so far.”

Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio), hoisting a florescent orange road worker’s vest, declared, “I want to see that all over the highway.”

“There’s a new definition for dismal failure: stimulus,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.)

“But don’t take my word for it,” Diaz-Balart said. “Remember, the stimulus promised 3.5 million jobs was being created, and yet 2 million jobs – additional lost jobs – have been lost. Dismal failure.”

“The stimulus promised,” said Diaz-Balart, “and we were told that in the budget committee and we were told that publicly by the administration, that unemployment would not go above 8 percent if that stimulus passed. Look at the numbers now.”

“The unemployment picture is bad,” said Duncan. “The underemployment picture is probably even worse because you have thousands and thousands of college graduates out there having to work as waiters and waitresses or having to work very low paying jobs.”

Diaz-Balart said that the stimulus was “at the cost of over $1 trillion on our children and grandchildren’s credit card. To do what? To lose more jobs and to spend more money on federal bureaucracy. Totally, totally unacceptable.”

“Now look,” he said, “my preference would be to not continue to borrow that money and to continue to blow it on wasteful spending. But if you’re going to spend the money, for God’s sake, let’s do it on creating jobs.”

“We have got to make some changes,” Duncan said. “We advocated, the Republicans advocated, doing away with all of these environmental restrictions that have caused the average infrastructure project to take 10 years, when they could be done in two or three years.”

“This country could boom beyond belief,” Duncan said, “if we would open this country up and go back to a free-market, free-enterprise system that that we’re too far away from at this time.”

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 passed in the Senate (61-37) and House (246-183) almost strictly on party lines. Only three Republicans voted for it in the Senate, and every Republican and seven Democrats opposed it in the House. It was signed into law by President Barack Obama on Feb. 17.

Faced with criticism and nationwide unemployment at 9.5 percent – higher than the administration forecast even without the stimulus – President Obama last week said the stimulus was working “as intended” and that it “wasn’t designed to work in four months – it was designed to work over two years.”

“We’re moving in the right direction,” Obama said. “We must let it work the way it’s supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity.”