Updated: Obama Stimulus Creates New Congressional Districts and Promotes New Mexico from Banana Republic to Coconut Republic
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According to the Obama Administration, the expenditure of $61,000 in federal stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 created or saved 25 jobs in New Mexico’s 22nd Congressional District. You read that right: New Mexico’s Twenty-Second Congressional District. (We only have enough population for three congressional districts).
Federal stimulus dollars, according to the Obama Administration, as reported at www.recovery.gov, also created or saved 15.8 jobs in the 35th Congressional Distict (where $8.96 million in stimulus dollars were spent) and 2.7 jobs in NM 00 (which received $731.370).
Other fictional New Mexico Congressional Districts receiving stimulus money were NM 40 (no jobs for $7.96 million), NM 4 (10 jobs created/saved for $4.72 million), NM 13 (5 jobs created for $3.3 million), NM 16 (no jobs for $517,980), NM 9 (no jobs for $100,000), NM 6 (1 job created/saved for $63,199) and the 25th Congressional District that received a mere $6,819.
It’s all right here, the official word from the Obama Administration on the postive effects of nearly a trillion in stimulus spending it is reporting in the Land of Enchantment. Here’s the New Mexico summary page listing over $16 million of spending in New Mexico’s 35th and 40th Congressional Districts…kind of a tip off that something is really amiss. Click the “view all Congressional districts” at the bottom of the table listing five Congressional districts for New Mexico and you’ll be taken to the page listing jobs created/saved and money expended in the ten new Congressional districts for New Mexico created miraculously as the result of the stimulus spending.
This comes on the heels of our report this morning that the Obama Administration claims to have created or saved over 4,800 New Mexico jobs in the space of a few weeks.
Update: Reader David Harris has pointed out (correctly) that the certification for the expenditure of all the stimulus funds going to New Mexico, according to the certification linked on the New Mexico summary page, is Benigno R. Fitial, Governor, Commonwealth of North Mariana Islands. From banana republic to coconut republic, I guess. Amazing what a trillion dollars can do.
Posted under News.
Tags: Jim Scarantino, phantom congressional districts
21 Comments For This Post So Far
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10:06 pm on November 16th, 2009
Those extra districts will be voting Obama into the Presidency in 2012 and 2016 and 2020.
4:40 am on November 17th, 2009
I volunteered for him — day after day — and clearly he has put monkeys to preparing this report. It’s a humiliation, but keep up the good work.
1:48 pm on November 17th, 2009
I was hoping to find something big and scandalous here, but there’s not much to see. The New Mexico summary page (linked to above and here: http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/StateSummaries/Pages/StateSummary.aspx?StateCode=NM) shows that there are not 40 districts, but districts 1,2,3, and 5 or 6 others. Clearly the data has been input incorrectly and needs to be fixed, but that seems to be the extent of the problem. The relative amount of spending in these non-existent districts is minuscule @$20 million when compared to that which was spent in actual New Mexico districts @$1.5 Billion.
In my home state of Utah, it refers to an as-of-yet non-existent 4th congressional district as well as district 00, but the totals for these districts are well within the tolerance of data entry errors.
That being said, I still think the Obama stimulus package was an utter waste of time and money (they repaved a 4-mile stretch of freeway with stimulus money here–a stretch that had been paved–although badly–about 1 or 2 years ago). I also think that it is less that fruitless for Obama Administration to claim that they have any idea how many new jobs they created.
9:40 pm on August 15th, 2010
So, it looks like a recording error on the basis of Zipcodes, or Congressional districts matched to the wrong state — or perhaps, money being spent in New Mexico from a grant or contract or loan to another state.
Is it your allegation that these funds were illegally paid out? Do you know, here several months later, what happened to that money, or to the reporting?