Research

Testifying before the House Appropriations Committee this morning, Christina Romer, Obama’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, claimed “one of the best ways to see what the Recovery Act is doing is in the projects that are actually started.” Obama’s budget director went one step further in his stimulus claims:

“[T]o date, there have not been the kinds of stories about substantial fraud and substantial abuse that one may have expected given an activity this large.”

Well, let’s take look at a stimulus project in Fresno, California, where the city used a portion of an $11 million award from President Obama’s Recovery Act to renovate this home.

The house was empty for about a year before it was bought at auction for $66,001 by the Redevelopment Agency in October, said Marlene Murphy, the agency's executive director. So far, the agency has sunk about $200,000 into buying and repairing the home. It's listed for sale at $160,000.

So money-losing deals don’t fall under the administration’s definition of waste, fraud and abuse? Of course, this is not the first time your money has been spent on projects with dubious merits. Stimulus funds have been used to repave tennis courts in Montana, fund wine trains in California and Martini Bars in Missouri. Even worse, the stimulus has done nothing to improve the job situation in Fresno County, with its unemployment rate rise from 16.3 percent to 16.8 percent since the stimulus passed in February 2009, a loss of almost 3,500 jobs.