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Signs of a Failed Stimulus

By: Congressman Aaron Schock (Diary)  |  September 15th, 2010 at 11:18 AM  | 

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Two years ago, signs promoting Barack Obama were everywhere: on buildings, billboards and bumper stickers.  Not much has changed, except now you are paying for this propaganda to promote the President and his floundering “stimulus” spending plan.  Reports indicate these signs can cost taxpayers as much as $10,000 each, with my home state of Illinois spending more than $650,000 on them.  Worse, the stimulus ads tout a program that has failed – as the signs promise – in “putting America back to work.”

It is our job as federal watchdogs to investigate why the White House has wasted potentially hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars advertising a spending splurge that hasn’t met any of the President’s own sales pitches: that the $862 billion would keep unemployment below 8% (today it’s 9.6%) and generate, by the end of this year, more than 4 million private sector jobs (we’ve lost 2.51 million).  No amount of propaganda, some of which promotes President Obama personally, could convince taxpayers the stimulus is working.

These cold, hard facts haven’t stopped the Obama Administration from trying.  Working with independent government watchdogs, our investigation has found that the White House strongly encourages, if not requires, stimulus grant recipients to post pro-stimulus signs as part of the funding package.  This unwelcome spending transparency has already shamed one agency into relaxing its propaganda requirements, but we need your help both tracking down these signs and holding the Administration accountable for its broken job creation promises.

If you see a sign, take a picture and send it to us with the location at stimulussigns@mail.house.gov.  We will add your pictures to an interactive, sharable map [link to map page here] showing that, even as the stimulus fails to create jobs, the Obama Administration continues to use your own money to try to convince you otherwise.

The American people have already taken a stand against this wasteful Washington spending that doesn’t create jobs.  Thousands of taxpayers voted through House Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s YouCut website to cut funding for any more stimulus signs, force the federal bureaucracy to report how much has been wasted on them and take that money back from agency budgets.  We listened to you and forced these cuts to a vote before the full House of Representatives.  Even though the Democrat majority defeated us, we will continue working to deliver you a federal government that allows the private sector to create jobs, doesn’t hide behind propaganda and saves more than it spends.

So be a watchdog and help us track these signs of a failed stimulus.

Congressman Schock, an Illinois Republican, is a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

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  • Death_of_the_Donkey

    that those sign-maker jobs were also accounted for in the stimulus’ job creation component and thus the plan is working.

    • etlib

      LOL! Probably at least three jobs created are counted for each sign: One to design it, one to create it and one to install it. Maybe it takes two jobs to install a sign.

  • proudmarinemom

    The final stretch of the Fairfax County Parkway was opened. This road has been in planning stages since 1960. Construction began 10 years ago.

    There is a huge orange and green sign on the Fullerton Road section of the project (near Springfield, Va) trumpeting the nonsense that this was funded by the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”.

    I have wanted for some time to have a large orange sticker made to slap over the “Putting America to Work!” slogan. My sticker would cover the words “To Work!” and replace them with the words “In Debt!”

    What a joke.

  • greeneyeshade

    You have the GAO and IG to be “watchdogs”, so request audits.

  • greeneyeshade

    You have the GAO and IG to be “watchdogs”, so request audits.

    • Congressman Aaron Schock

      We have written to the IG for an exact number, which they have been unable to provide to date. Additionally – it seems to me that a vigilant public can provide some of the most effective oversight over the government bureaucracies.

  • http://impudent.edublogs.org/ kyle8

    It is important to know this economic fact. Suppose that instead of being spent on pork and cronyism, the stimulus had actually been spent on infrastructure improvements.

    Now, those projects might be good or necessary things unto themselves, however, even if this was the case IT WOULD NOT HAVE PUSHED US OUT OF A RECESSION!

    The reason is that it is not possible to stimulate aggregate demand enough through borrowing and spending by government.

    It did not work during the great depression, it did not work in the USA and Europe in the 1950′s, or in the 1970′s. It did not work in South America, it did not work in Japan in the lost decade of the 1990′s. And it is not working now.

    All it does is increase uncertainty, increase debt, and in the long run increases inflation pressures.

    • davesinsanantonio

      frosting on the cake to those “progressives” who wish to “fundamentally change America” by destroying the free market system.

  • astrojohn8

    Plenty of signs in the swing states. Ohio is going right, hence lots of signs all over the place.

  • morninginamerica

    I get the austerity part, we should contol spending. John Kaisch of the class of ’94 showed how, and you’re from Illinois — the Land of Runaway Spending. You know how the machine works.

    We need GROWTH! The Democrats are pushing the GOP into austerity corner again, where we are afraid to cut taxes and regulation. Why do we always fall for that one and have to clean up their messes? They spent all the money, not working, taxpaying Americans.

    The Democrats are brialliant to con us into fighting for the status quo, holding on to Bush tax cuts, when we should be running on new lower rates just like Reagan.

    What happened to the 15% and 28% brakets in place when he left. They should be 15% and 20%, because the economy has grown so much since Reagan’s Recovery began.

  • timchgo9

    Chicago area, those stupid signs are everywhere. Go to the west side, and there is at least one billboard with is picture on it. Pro Obama signs are everywhere in Maywood, Bellwood,and the West Side. Head out into DuPage County in the western suburbs, and you don’t see them anymore, except on the cars of idealistic students and faculty at the College of DuPage. Also, in Cook County they are, or rather, were everywhere. When they were resurfacing Ogden Ave, 31st St, 47th St, and Willow Springs Road over the summer, those signs were at each site, even though the plans for the resurfacing were announced before the President took office, and the contracts handed out nearly two years ago. (Around here, some road projects are announced two to three years in advance). There was also a sign on the Stone Ave. METRA station project, which, from what I understand had been part of a planned upgrade, and was not funded by the stimulus, but the sign was there anyway.

    • mnroadwarrior

      during the Great Depression (tantamount to hundreds of billions today) on infrastructure. It (with other factors being enacted or played with at the time)lead not to increased employment, growth in the economy, or public confidence but to Henry Morgenthau’s (Roosevelt’s treasury secretary) diary statement,” We have tried spending money. We are spending more than have ever spent before and it does not work….I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started…… And an enoumous debt to boot!”
      Too bad Silent Cal was not inspired enough to run for another term. I don’t believe he would have made Hoover’s mistakes……….and we then might have never even heard of FDR………..or at least have been spared some of the diseases we suffer from today.
      And, as I am sure most of the readers and posters of RedState know, the moniker “Great Depression” fit the U.S.’s economic reality as opposed to the “depression” being experienced by the rest of the world.

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  • msctex

    . . .I haven’t seen any of the billboards mentioned. There is a some paint on a wall which serves as the graffito equivalent of hagiography, but that’s all I’ve noticed.

    What I’m wondering, is given that Texas is beyond the reach of
    Hope and Change, and that the billboards mentioned obviously exist elsewhere, is that if a telling sign of propaganda is that it is used to reinforce, rather than to sway. If true propaganda shows up in areas they they think they have won, and they simply don’t bother elsewhere.

  • Richard Mullins

    I guess TXDOT had a copyright infringement case on it from the Feds on this. Don’t want to have them have their signs defaced just like many others here.