According to data obtained from recovery.gov (the federal government’s official American Recovery and Reinvestment Act website), San Diego County’s five congressional districts were awarded a combined total of $1,712,455,003 in stimulus funds during the first quarter of 2010. In this same time period, stimulus recipients reported that in exchange for the awarded tax dollars, 1,955.3 jobs were created. So, after doing a bit of long division, this Rostrafian has concluded that it takes approximately $875,801 to create 1 job in San Diego.
What are these jobs and why does it take so much money to create them? Well as part of an ongoing Rostra series, I will be exploring the Recovery website and highlighting some of the inefficient, confusing, and just plain wasteful projects that are not creating jobs for San Diegans.
First up is a relatively tiny sub-grant in the amount of $60,000. It was awarded to Vronay Engineering Services, Inc., for their Integrated Advanced Reciprocrating Internal Combustion Engine System for Increased Utilization of Gaseous Opportunity Fuels Project.
Sounds important doesn’t it? Perhaps, but as the old saying goes – don’t judge a stimulus project by the length of its name. Instead, judge it by the number of jobs that it created, and in this instance the tally is 0.
Sure, $60,000 does not sound like a lot of money and when you compare it to the billions of dollars that are being spent elsewhere, it really isn’t . However, just in the brief time that I spent on the recovery website, I spotted at least 20 more of these non-job creating type grants in the San Diego area alone. Multiply that by the tens of thousands more that are sure to be spread out across the country and you end up with billions of dollars in waste.
