Seattle program gets fed grant to make money vanish
Want to see how government rolls up its sleeves and solves a problem? Well last year Seattle got a $20 million grant from the federal gummint (that would be from us taxpayers) to insulate 2,000 low-income homes.
That works out to a net cost of ten thousand bucks per home, but what the hell--it's a gummint project so we'd expect some waste. Plus they were gonna spend a chunk of that money *training* folks to use a caulking gun or unroll rolled-up insulation. In fact, they were planning to "create" (as in, "created or saved") a whole bunch of jobs at the same time.
And not just any ol' jobs, but real honest-to-goodness "living wage" Jobs! None of those cheap-ass jobs in factories or Starbucks.
If fact, the grant writer said the money would create--by coincidence--2,000 such Jobs. So we'll cut 'em some slack here, since some of that money was to be used for...you get the picture.
So...how'd they actually do with that $20 million of your money?
As of last week they'd insulated ("retrofitted") a total of 3 homes.
Wait, that must be a typo, right? Should be 300, right? I mean, they'd said they were gonna insulate 2,000 low-income homes, and even 300 would be a huge failure. To have insulated just...three?... I wouldn't think it possible that anyone could be that incompetent without getting fired.
So let me check the source. Yep, three homes.
Typical Seattle liberal: "Welllll, that's probably because once they got to studying the economic effects, they realized that creating jobs was SO much more important, so they ended up putting 98 percent of the grant money into job creation instead. Yeh, dat's da ticket."
Okay, so how many jobs were created?
Answer, according to the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer (now on-line after folding the print edition...because it was so hugely profitable and had so many readers)?
14.
C'mon, that must be fourteen hundred. Darn typos.
Nope. Fourteen jobs, period.
And as the PI article euphemistically notes, "Many of the jobs are administrative, not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers." This, dear readers, is classic government: Throw tens of millions of precious dollars at a program, run by ultra-liberals with zero business experience, whose only qualifications are 1) they support the Democrats in power in DC; and 2) they've got a grant writer who knows what buttons to push to make the grant machine pay off.
And then when the program achieves less than one-tenth of one percent of the results it claimed would be achieved, hope that no one notices.
On the other hand, from the grant writer's standpoint it was a huge success--and you can be assured he's already put his "success" on his resume.
Similarly, the grant funded 14 "administrative positions" for a year, quite nicely, thank you. From the standpoint of those grandees as well, the program worked perfectly.
Think on this all-too-typical tale next time Obama and the Dems propose a second huge "stimulus" bill to fix the nation's economy, at the bargain price of only mumble-billion dollars.
Oh, and I'm not picking on the dumb liberals in Seattle. I'm sure in at least half of the 57 states the results would have been just as laughably bad.
That works out to a net cost of ten thousand bucks per home, but what the hell--it's a gummint project so we'd expect some waste. Plus they were gonna spend a chunk of that money *training* folks to use a caulking gun or unroll rolled-up insulation. In fact, they were planning to "create" (as in, "created or saved") a whole bunch of jobs at the same time.
And not just any ol' jobs, but real honest-to-goodness "living wage" Jobs! None of those cheap-ass jobs in factories or Starbucks.
If fact, the grant writer said the money would create--by coincidence--2,000 such Jobs. So we'll cut 'em some slack here, since some of that money was to be used for...you get the picture.
So...how'd they actually do with that $20 million of your money?
As of last week they'd insulated ("retrofitted") a total of 3 homes.
Wait, that must be a typo, right? Should be 300, right? I mean, they'd said they were gonna insulate 2,000 low-income homes, and even 300 would be a huge failure. To have insulated just...three?... I wouldn't think it possible that anyone could be that incompetent without getting fired.
So let me check the source. Yep, three homes.
Typical Seattle liberal: "Welllll, that's probably because once they got to studying the economic effects, they realized that creating jobs was SO much more important, so they ended up putting 98 percent of the grant money into job creation instead. Yeh, dat's da ticket."
Okay, so how many jobs were created?
Answer, according to the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer (now on-line after folding the print edition...because it was so hugely profitable and had so many readers)?
14.
C'mon, that must be fourteen hundred. Darn typos.
Nope. Fourteen jobs, period.
And as the PI article euphemistically notes, "Many of the jobs are administrative, not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers." This, dear readers, is classic government: Throw tens of millions of precious dollars at a program, run by ultra-liberals with zero business experience, whose only qualifications are 1) they support the Democrats in power in DC; and 2) they've got a grant writer who knows what buttons to push to make the grant machine pay off.
And then when the program achieves less than one-tenth of one percent of the results it claimed would be achieved, hope that no one notices.
On the other hand, from the grant writer's standpoint it was a huge success--and you can be assured he's already put his "success" on his resume.
Similarly, the grant funded 14 "administrative positions" for a year, quite nicely, thank you. From the standpoint of those grandees as well, the program worked perfectly.
Think on this all-too-typical tale next time Obama and the Dems propose a second huge "stimulus" bill to fix the nation's economy, at the bargain price of only mumble-billion dollars.
Oh, and I'm not picking on the dumb liberals in Seattle. I'm sure in at least half of the 57 states the results would have been just as laughably bad.
posted by SF at
9:10 AM
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