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Washington, Oct 28, 2009 - By Iowa Congressman Tom Latham
Iowa's 4th Congressional District

Recovery.gov, the White House’s online guide to stimulus package spending, has a handy feature that allows visitors to the site to track stimulus spending and job creation broken down by congressional district.  Here’s a link to the tracking feature.  I invite you to visit the site and take a look for yourself.

I did some research on Recovery.gov and found that Iowa’s 4th Congressional District has received about $500 million in stimulus spending, which has led to the creation of 1,389.27 jobs.  For those keeping score, that’s a cost to taxpayers of about $358,566 per job.  In an official February 2009 document, the White House claimed that Iowa’s 4th District would gain 6,700 jobs as a result of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus spending bill.  Eight months after the bill was signed into law, the stimulus has created fewer than one-fourth that number in the 4th District and unemployment continues to jump.

This was a $787 billion spending bill that was rushed through Congress on the claim that failure to act immediately would doom our economy.  Supporters claimed that enactment of the stimulus would stop unemployment from topping 8 percent.  Today, the national unemployment rate is approaching 10 percent.  These numbers indicate that the immediate impact of the stimulus bill has fallen far short of what was promised. Americans are asking where the jobs are, and it has become abundantly clear that the stimulus bill is not the answer.