Has Left-Wing Activism Been “Stimulated”?
Russ Moore’s article highlighting how little stimulus money seems to have been spent on infrastructure comes at a good time:
Yet that fact has led many talking heads and casual political observers alike wondering why, after the enactment of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, otherwise known as “the Obama stimulus package” that saw almost $787 billion spent on a national level with just under $1.1 billion sent to Rhode Island, the state still has roads and bridges that can only be described as woeful.
The answer is probably as frustrating as it is simple: it’s because a relatively small amount of money was actually allocated to roads and bridges. According to a GoLocalProv review of federal data on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus spending, just under 9 percent ($95,493,854) of the $1.096 billion that Rhode Island received was given to the Rhode Department of Transportation and used to fix the state’s crumbling roads and bridges.
As I state in the article, it’s pretty clear that Obama’s stimulus wasn’t meant to actually get anything done for the people of America. It was intended to insulate government at every level from the effects of the recession, to help reinflate the stock market bubble, and to direct taxpayer dollars (rather, taxpayer debt) to the activists with whom Obama is aligned.
For an example on that last point, I’ve noted before that the PolicyLink group that provided the equity piece of the RhodeMap RI puzzle is largely funded through the Dept. of Housing and Urban development, as well as the government entities that receive grants from HUD. Stimulus didn’t fix our roads, but it did build infrastructure for Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of our country.
It would require more investigative reporting than I have the time to pursue, but one has to wonder how much of the stunning activism we’ve seen in the past few years — to radically change our society and promote a far-left worldview out of keeping with the principles of our constitutional republic — was directly bankrolled by us.
