Figures don't lie...but liars sure as hell figure

The American Recovery and Reinvestmet Act, the stimulus bill is getting some headlines in Kansas. A top Treasury official will be in Kansas tomorrow to celebrate the first project in Kansas using stimulus funds. The event is the grand opening of a senior citizen housing project in Osawatomie. That this project is being touted as an example of the success of the stimulus bill is an amazing stretch of reality.



The Woodland Hills Estates is a senior citizen housing project that was planned as replacement housing for residences that were destroyed in a 2007 flood. It is 22 two-bedroom units. The timeline here is extremely important. The city council of Osawatomie gave approval to the zoning for this development on October 9, 2008. The "stimulus bill" was signed by the president on February 13, 2009. The tenants started moving in the first part of July. Now it is very clear that the project was well underway by the time the "stimulus" became law. If it wasn't I'm not sure that I'd want to be in a housing development of 22 units that was built in less than 4 months.



The developer is getting a tax credit of slightly over 2 million dollars from the stimulus bill. That kind and amount of a tax credit certainly raises issues about overall tax policies and the adverse effect that high taxes have on economic growth, but those issues are best left for another blog.



It is clear that this project was well underway prior to the "stimulus" bill even being considered. While I don't begrudge the developer taking advantage of the tax credit., to claim that this is a success of the stimulus bill stretches the facts to an incredulous level.



We were told by the president that if the stimulus bill was not rammed through congress back in February, unemployment would rise to 9%. Even with it being rammed through, unemployment now stands at 9.5% and climbing. The administration has used the phrase, jobs created or saved, even though that "saved" job figure is something that is completely unmeasurable. Now projects like the one described above are being used as "success" stories of the stimulus. As my dad used to say, "figures don't lie, but liars sure as hell figure", using this and similar projects as successes for the stimulus bill just make the administration into even bigger liars than they've proven to be so far.