Here’s one factoid about that: One of Obama’s first acts as President in early 2009 was to put about 280 billion dollars of an 800 billion dollar fund designated for “stimulus” into state public union pension funds. I’d be surprised if he found something better to do with rest of that money.
Harold, Wow, how did that get under my radar? Gotta link?
FWIW, I have a friend that got hired by FEMA for NJ-Mega-Storm-Sandy. As an out of Stater brought in under temporary contract, he was horrified going under bridges and seeing the roads, i.e. as they ( especially the bridges ) are crumbling. I had to tell them, what did you expect, highly unionized blue State that probably squabbled more about contracts and pensions with tax money rather than plowing those dollars back into rebuilding said roads and bridges.
Don’t forget that once that $800 billion stimulus was placed in the budget it has remained there every since. It is the primary reason for most of the new trillion dollar deficits in each budget since then.
Of that $80 billion was set aside for the infamous shovel ready projects. Funny thing about that is the Feds only allocated that once. So the Feds budget about $250 billion for transport called MAP 21 but it doesn’t include any of that additional $80 billion. So what has that money been spent on for the last 4 years?