by INFORUM
Tracking stimulus dollars: Impacts of federal aid visible throughout the community
January 9, 2011 at 6:00 pm in INFORUM
Whether it’s through rental assistance for the would-be homeless or better public transportation services, the federal stimulus package has made a mark on the Fargo-Moorhead area. Continue Reading
So what jobs were created??? “It might have prevented job cuts”??? Oh brother what a waste of money.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Even when faced with the facts some people seem to want to deny them, like bearly there. Obviously based ON THE FACTS it has helped tremendously:
http://politicalcorrection.org/blog/201008240007
NOTE: “The oft-criticized stimulus plan boosted the economy in the second quarter by as much as 4.5%, the Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.
In a report published the same day as Minority Leader John Boehner’s criticism of President Obama’s economic policy, the CBO said the stimulus law boosted the economy by between 1.7% and 4.5%, lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.”
Hot debate. What do you think?
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2010 GDP was $14.1T. Stimulus is estimated (CBO per your link above) at $814B with half spent in 2010. So we spend 2.9% of GDP to make GDP rise by 1.7% to 4.5% in the second quarter with, from the CBO report “The effects of ARRA on output and employment are expected to gradually diminish during the second half of 2010 and beyond.” Spend $400B and increase the GDP between $240B and $635B.
Was there an impact? Sure. You can’t go throw around half a trillion dollars and not have an impact. But that is also a half trillion dollars added to our debt. This will be a drag on our economy for years to come.
These articles that look at benefit without considering cost are intellectually dishonest (See Ahlin’s column yesterday on Healthcare as Exhibit B).
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Cleo- You want facts? Read the article then. It said several dozen jobs were created at a cost of $105 million. Great use of ours tax dollars. Anyone that believes that it was good use, must be liberal.
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ND spending was $1,700 per person, not $1,700 per 1000 people as reported.
600,000 people. $1.1B. Do the math (no wait, I did it for you already).
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What a joke this article is! First, the City of Fargo took stimulus money and bought 5 brand new buses exclusively for NDSU not to mention more shelters–heated shelters for NDSU–which doesn’t benefit the public one bit–except that the public has to pay for it all! There are still buses on the street that should have been retired in 2009–the oldest and least dependable buses for public use–guess it shows how little the public is thought of–despite the fact the public,once again pays for everything! Long waits–try using MAT and having it NEVER show up or taking 2-3 hours to get home–not to mention having the adult bus pass go up $5 with no new routes–in ten years–and no improved service to address shopping and employment needs! But you have the colleges–staff-faculty-and students-paying NOTHING–what’s wrong with this picture?? MAT is to ineffective and inefficient it barely can address an 8-5 job! Those of you who criticize MAT have your points–but don’t blame the riders–put the blame on sloppy, ineffective, incompetent management and overall poor fiscal management. NO bus service can afford to allow all this non-payment of fares–except for MAT! There is a contant whine from transit there is No money to do anything–to expand–well, start collecting fares from everyone and run a system that WORKS!
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It’s not free, the universities pay MAT based on ridership figures. That information is available on MAT’s website here: http://www.matbus.com/Upass.htm
Please let me know outside of major storms where service could be restricted to snow emergency routes and sometimes canceled all together, when did you ever have to wait 2-3 hours to catch the bus?
Regarding the fare increases, nothing costs the same as it did 10 years ago. So even if the service didn’t expand, operating and maintaining existing service is more costly, just look at fuel costs.
Is MAT perfect? No, but they provide a valuable service to the community and they sure made some enhancements to their service with the federal stimulus dollars.
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No, the taxpayers pay that bill. So it amounts to a double whammy.
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Universities don’t pay that bill, the taxpayers do. So it becomes a double whammy.
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Making the university system more attractive to other students, employment of professors and others, the money the students spend in the economy doesn’t benefit the public? Please tell me how it doesn’t….
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The students may have an impact on two things, ramen noodles and beer.
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And it still keeps people employed.
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Fact is most are doing more with less, so attracting more students does not equal more faculty. I would agree the impact from the faculty is much greater than the students.
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Say that when they bail you out of yet another flood…
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I was a student at one time, that was not dig. It was the truth. I will not be needing your help this spring, next spring or ever.
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Somebody help me here, the stimulus created one part time job and also helped families get housing, then why does Public Housing have a waiting list of 1-2yrs? New busses, who did that impact? I suppose the public housing funds that were sent will benefit some of those landlords who own the low budget rentals, not saying any names but I think we have a local land lord playing politics right now.
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“But you have the colleges–staff-faculty-and students-paying NOTHING–what’s wrong with this picture?? ”
This is incorrect as has been pointed out many times. They don’t pay per ride they pay in fees.
Your $5 monthly bus pass wouldn’t even get you 2 gallons of gas.
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The country is $14 trillion in debt!! One question for the people that think this is a great idea and spend: Every man, woman and child is $46,000 in debt from the federal side alone!! Just for FM metro, that is a federal debt on $10 billion-10 times the states surplus. That is 10 diversions! When do you want the spending to end??
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The problem isn’t spending when the economy is in the toilet. That needs to happen. Revenues go down, but the needs for so many things are either static (like defense), or counter-cyclical (like student aid for people who lose their jobs and go back to school). Our problem is the refusal to pay it back in more prosperous times.
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So as Mike S. pointed out….the stimulous bill amounted to $1700 per person in North Dakota. Does this simply add $1700 per person to the already $46,000 per person, pointed out by Chins, that each U.S. citizen owes, making our new total debt per person $47,700? We all know that the Federal government has no money and had to borrow the stimulous money…so how could it be anything other than that?
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The “jobs saved” statistic is meaningless. Why is it mindlessly parroted?
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I’ll grant that the numbers could be easily manipulated, and as a result the statistic is unreliable. HOWEVER, it would be an impossibility for there to not have been more jobs as a result of stimulus spending than there would have been without it.
You’re conflating the statistic itself with the value of the whole program. It’s a deceptive tactic.
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The first paragraph says it all…”Whether it’s through rental assistance for the would-be homeless or better public transportation services, the federal stimulus package has made a mark on the Fargo-Moorhead area.”
Rental assistance and public transportation are prime examples of dollars going nowhere. Both are money drains on any level. Rental assistance is nothing more than wealth redistribution. And in the history of the world, there has never been a public transportation system that has paid for itself–always a net loser.
“made a mark” alright; it has further contributed to our national debt while doing zero for our GDP.
It’s really rather simple, government does not create wealth, it redistributes it, nothing more. Private individuals and businesses are the only source of wealth anywhere. The rest, including government, are merely takers.
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Of course any good provided cheaply (or free) to the public is a “loser”, when you measure it in terms of its cost versus what it brings in! It’s a strange point to make, and in the case of public transportation, it ignores a myriad of things: from the money saved on gas, vehicle payments, upkeep, insurance, etc. to the economic benefit of having people be mobile enough to take more productive jobs because they can get to work. Its nearly impossible to quantify.
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Omega-X: It’s not impossible to quantify, it’s a net loser period.
Whose money saved on gas the individual’s? Yes, but then the cost of moving that individual on public transportation is borne by us by fiat, not by choice. Same goes for the rest of your list: vehicle payments, upkeep, insurance, etc.
And oh by the way, when we don’t buy gas or maintain vehicles as individuals, those businesses suffer losses.
There is no way to make any economic sense of public transportation. None.
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I’ll take your word for it when you can find me a number that states the amount of economic benefit (no matter how small) for people who upgrade jobs because they can get to the new one, and for the increase in property value due to people being able to commute from an area with few jobs into “the city”. It might not be obvious around here, but in a major city, that is a pretty big number.
The upkeep and fuel for a bus is going to be significantly cheaper than 30 cars. That doesn’t break in your favor, either. Replacing parts that wouldn’t need to be replaced is “dead weight loss” to the economy.
By the way, when those people don’t buy gas and those businesses lose, the demand goes down. Prices get cheaper for the rest of us, and we all win.
There are all kinds of crazy, nebulous things that I could get into: lower emissions lead to less respiratory trouble, which leads to lower health care costs… We can go around forever. There is no way you accounted for every little thing, and to be fair, neither have I. My point isn’t that it’s a winner, my point is that it’s impossible to do a complete cost/benefit analysis.
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Let’s not get lost in the weeds here Omega-X. We could debate the relative value (dollars or intangible) of public transportation until the end of time and won’t come to a consensus.
The bottom line is these institutions are the result of decisions made for that nebulous thing called the “greater good.” And from my firm libertarian beliefs, these words are akin to fingernails on a chalkboard. It’s real basic: socialism (or a derivative of it) vs. individual freedoms. In the end, that’s what we are talking about. The use (or, as I believe in this case, misuse) of public dollars by a select few to achieve some sort of mediocre level of Shangri-La.
I just want to argue one small point: Why can’t buses be a private enterprise if its such a worthwhile goal. I will even go so far as to allow some public dollars to bolster the balance sheet of whatever enterprising company should take this up. They’d never be profitable, on that we can agree. But why does it have to be governmental enterprises operating this stuff?
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The “greater good” isn’t just some touchy-feely buzzword. It reflects the notion that some things are worth doing for society, but won’t be profitable for a single entity to do them because of the “free-rider problem” (really ironic, considering this started as a conversation about buses).
Lighthouses are my favorite example. No business would ever build one, because you can’t charge people to look at it. So, it will never be profitable. However, the economic benefit to the port that had one far outweighed its cost.
The common-good really does exist. Liberals and Conservatives have a different opinion about what should qualify, but far too many people just dismiss it as a Liberal buzzword without looking any deeper.
As far as the private buses go, I just don’t think that all the economic benefits to the community would be measured in that company’s balance sheet, and therefore, when it folded because it didn’t make money, we’d all be worse off for it.
It’s kind of like how they changed the formula that dictates whether they’ll book an act to play the Fargodome to include local economic impacts: if you just looked at it in terms of the dome’s balance sheet, it may not make money, but tons of other businesses cleaned up, and the sales tax receipts made up more than the difference.
It needs to be government, because it’s the only entity with the mandate to be looking out for everybody and not just itself. Government is the only way big problems with equally big free-rider problems get solved.
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Is no one appalled at the colossal waste of money? We have sold our souls to the Chinese and for what? It has had no impact whatsoever. A curse on those who voted for this community organizer who has never run a kool aid stand, what made people think he could run this country? It is a good thing that Moorhead is offering Mandarin to its students, they are going to need it. In not a good way either.
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Thank God the government gave us all that money that they created and saved all the jobs around here. Fortunately, the government knows how to best spend our money, and will have to raise our taxes to pay for their decisions soon. It is the responsible thing to do after all. I mean, just look at our huge debt. Massive. The government simply must raise taxes to pay that off. Unlike business, or households, which would stop spending money on other things to pay down debt, our government should never have too. Those people who rule us should just keep spending our money for us and they should make sure we are all fat and happy. No one should ever feel pain, and we should all be exactly equal. Heck, taxes are patriotic. Thank you benevolent masters for redistributing the money as you see fit. You are doing a hell of a job.
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All I saw was a bunch of people who could already afford nice cars, get a welfare check to get better, really nice new cars. It was called Cash For Clunkers program. I had poor friends who couldn’t afford that program, so when they got their tax return, used the refund to buy real clunkers, a thousand to two thousand dollar cars. That program was a joke. A waste of tax payers money.
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I read that program actually cost the government about 25k per car. Incredible waste and mismanagement but I can’t name a program that does work effectively or come in on or under budget so I shouldn’t be surprised. I knew a woman with 3 kids that could have used one of those minivans they crushed, appalling the waste our government does.
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it is really interesting to read what the g.o.p. stalwarts have to say. they seem to forget that the 8 bush cheney years dug the hole that we are in. i imagine one could consider the bogus iraq war a ‘job producer’ for the amount of american troops that have spent time there. as to the $$$ the iraq venture is costing-last i checked, the war will cost each and every man, woman and child in the usa around $60,000.00! check what the till said when clinton’s administration left office vs what was there when bush/cheney cashed out. but, truth and logic aren’t real high on the g.o.p./tea partier’s list of responsibility! of course giving the richest citizens a tax break makes sense to the conservatives also. i hear the g.o.p.’s attacks on senator conrad on sta 109.6-bet hennen is glad to be back with his limbaughisms!
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I really liked how they pulled that 3.3 million jobs saved figure out of their errrrrrrrrrr ahhhhhhh hat. When they can’t show that what they did resulted in anything meaningful they make something up. They could have just as well said that they saved 100 million jobs. Then they would have really been successful.
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Just keep spending on luxury items so that China can start the foreclosure process on the US. Then we can just rent and learn to speak chinese.
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Don’t worry there is enough Chinese to fill in the blanks. They don’t need renters.
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