It is nothing short of disgusting to see over and over the waste and ineffectiveness of the $862 billion federal “stimulus.”
Among its many boondoggles is a $5 billion allotment to weatherize homes and make them more energy-efficient. The program was supposed to create lots of “green” jobs and reduce the “greenhouse gases” that environmental activists blame for “global warming.”
It hasn’t worked out that way.
“After a year of crippling delays, President Barack Obama’s $5 billion program to install weather-tight windows and doors has retrofitted a fraction of homes and created far fewer construction jobs than expected,” The Associated Press noted in an article aptly titled “Stimulus watch.”
Here are just a few of the program’s “crippling” flaws:
* Not a single home has been weatherized nor a single job created in the chilly states of Alaska and Wyoming nor in the District of Columbia.
* In California, which has about 37 million residents, the program has created only 84 jobs.
* Rules requiring the program to pay prevailing wages in any county where work is done forced the Department of Labor to use enormous resources to determine the prevailing wage in each of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties, according to the Government Accountability Office.
* Many homes slated for weatherization have to be checked in case they have some historic status that would prohibit the work, further gumming up the process.
* A year into the program, it has weatherized only a third of the 87,000 homes it should have handled by now, and only 5 percent of the overall number.
* In Illinois and Indiana, numerous weatherization workers hired under the program have proved incompetent.
Now, President Obama wants to pump billions more dollars into this money pit of a program — though our nation is $12.8 trillion in debt.
Is that rational?