Bloodthirsty Liberal

Sweet land of larceny,
Of thee I sing:

While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.

Picky, picky.

One of the largest reported jobs figures comes from Bridgewater State College, which is listed as using $77,181 in stimulus money for 160 full-time work-study jobs for students. But Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the college made a mistake and the actual number of new jobs was “almost nothing.’’ Bridgewater has submitted a correction, but it is not yet reflected in the report.

In other cases, federal money that recipients already receive annually - subsidies for affordable housing, for example - was reclassified this year as stimulus spending, and the existing jobs already supported by those programs were credited to stimulus spending. Some of these recipients said they did not even know the money they were getting was classified as stimulus funds until September, when federal officials told them they had to file reports.

“There were no jobs created. It was just shuffling around of the funds,’’ said Susan Kelly, director of property management for Boston Land Co., which reported retaining 26 jobs with $2.7 million in rental subsidies for its affordable housing developments in Waltham. “It’s hard to figure out if you did the paperwork right. We never asked for this.’’

The federal stimulus report for Massachusetts has so many errors, missing data, or estimates instead of actual job counts that it may be impossible to accurately tally how many people have been employed by the massive infusion of federal money. Massachusetts is expected to receive an estimated $1 billion more in stimulus contracts, grants, and loans.

Oh, come on, all you gotta do is go over to transparency.gov and it’s all there. That’s what President Obama said.

A billion dollars in Massachusetts essentially pissed away, unaccounted for, blown on maintaining a bloated and entrenched state bureaucracy. Are we the best, or what?

And, for once, we’re not alone:

We’ve already seen the deceptive and misleading statistics challenged by local and regional newspapers in several states, as well as by some of the national media. We can now add Colorado and Washington to that list, where Porkulus job numbers have been seriously inflated by adding in jobs that were never at risk in the first place.

…

The entire Porkulus accounting effort consists of these shell games. The Obama administration built it for this kind of dishonest reporting, in order to claim credit for doing something about joblessness while unemployment accelerates. We’ve wasted months and tens of billions of dollars already just to rescue states from doing what they should have done at the beginning of the year: downsize bureaucracies and roll back the cost of their government on their overburdened citizens.

These states join those already reporting the Porkulus fraud:

New Hampshire
Florida and Georgia
Ohio
Wisconsin
New Jersey
Virginia
Texas
Illinois

More will undoubtedly be forthcoming.

We’re right with you, Wisconsin! Wassup, Jersey! Illinois… well, maybe we’re not in that league of fraud. Yet.