The stimulus money: found

Have you wondered what happened to the three quarters of a $trillion in stimulus funds over the past two years?

I am able to look at San Francisco’s use of the funds and you should not be surprised at what I found.

Of the three quarters of $1 trillion in government stimulus one quarter went to invisible subsidies of mortgages, tax credits for children, tax credits for college expenses and extension of our unemployment insurance. Of the remaining half the bulk was simply written in the form of money given to state and local government’s.

So I looked at the quarter of $1 billion given to San Francisco over a two-year period. What I found was that the stimulus money came with a long list of projects to be funded. What I saw in the results was that none of the departments that were supposed to receive money showed any increase in their budget in either last year or the previous year. In fact many departments that were to receive funding showed decreases in their operating budgets.

What happened is that the entire quarter of $1 billion was used to close the budget deficit. The budget deficit was caused by rapidly rising employee pensions.

The stimulus money generated in Washington that came to San Francisco was used entirely to subsidize the pensions of city employees.

Does anybody wonder why the stimulus did not generate new jobs?

I have not dealt with the issue of how stimulus funds may have created a persistent unemployment society but I will deal with that in future blogs.