One Hundred Days and What Have We Got?

April 29, 2009

The Obama Administration has released a map/scorecard to highlight the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in each of the fifty states.

The information is broken down into five categories:

*Jobs Created or Saved by the Recovery Act--16,000 in NH

*Workers Receiving a Tax Credit--535,000 in NH

*Additional Children with Health Care--9,300 in NH

*Students Aided by American Opportunity Tax Credit--9,000 in NH

*Example Recovery Act Project--$135 million to pave nearly 760 miles of road in NH

While the New Hampshire "Project" could be characterized as rewarding the state for prior infrastructure neglect, at least our highway departments know what is needed to keep up with the annual depredations of Father Frost.

Many states seem to have chosen, as their "Project," to refill their Medicaid funds with the federal dollars. Of course, if we had a Universal Fund for Healing such stop-gap measures wouldn't be needed and our public officials could attend to making plans and provisions for less predictable events.

In a sense, of course, the whole stimulus package is a stop-gap measure made necessary by the fact that the so-called financiers of our "robust" economy of the last eight years invested in a lot of hot air and left our industrial and public facilities to rot.