I woke up this morning and while perusing recent articles I found yet another liberal puff piece about the stimulus funds in the Worcester Telegram. Unbelievably the reporter, Bob Salsberg of the Associated Press, wrote what amounts to a testiminonial for Federal Funds having helped Massachusetts in its dire time of need the past two years. Even the headline in big black bold letters proudly proclaimed that the Stimulus put $7,000,000,000 (Billion) in the state of Massachusetts' pocket! Both of the people quoted in the article, Michael Widmer and Rep. David Linsky D-Natick, are well known liberal democrats and added to the tone of the article by touting how effective the stimulus has been in staving off a major depression and in creating 71,000 MA jobs.
Of course there was no mention of the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in that same time frame or of the sluggishness of our economy two full years after the stimulus was passed. There were also no quotes from any Republican Pols or others who may have an opposing view on the matter. I guess if there had been, that in itself would have been news. As a fiscally conservative minded person, I was dead set against any of these so called stimulus bills. It is just not the right way get an economy going. Just ask yourself this. What would happen if you walked into a bank, told them you were $12,000 in debt which you could not afford to pay back, and then asked for $20,000? We all know the answer to that and if bankers think its's bad business for them, why is it good for our government? All that aside, the reality is that the stimulus bills have been passed and they are here. Given that, I have a huge problem with Massachusetts only receiving $7 Billion dollars.
Instead of rejoicing over that number, our elected leaders should be screaming at the top of their lungs for a bigger piece of the pie! $7 Billion is simply not nearly enough of the funds for a state the size of Massachusetts.
In February of 2009 Pesident Obama signed a stimulus bill which was for over $787 Billion. The $7 Billion Massachusetts has received amounts to less than 1% of the total. This for a state that is 14th in population and 8th in median income. You would think that with so many of our congressional seats held by Democrats, and a Governor who is supposed to be so close to the President, our state should have been able to get a heck of a lot more of those funds that were allocated. It is insidious that our citizens are paying so much more per year in Federal Income Taxes only to see the stimulus money unfairly distributed to so many other poorer states. A quick check of the US Census Burea http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/statemedfaminc.html figures shows that 6 out of the 10 poorest states are all recieving more stimulus funds per capita than Massachusetts. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/where-will-the-stimulus-money-go-a-state-by-state-breakdown/ Yet our elected leaders continue to tout the virtues of the funds we have received without addressing these glaring inequities in how they were handed out.
All of this leads back to questioning why reporters like Mr. Salsberg refuse to do their jobs and ask these same questions of our elected officials. I am not a professional reporter yet it took me less tham 1 hour to find the information I am referring to. We are being ripped off, scammed and swindled as taxpayers here in Massachusetts and it's time to start putting a stop to it!
