No Road Work Where It's Needed Most

Don Surber has the details:

President Obama excludes a rural Pennsylvania county from the stimulus bill.

AP reported: “Elk County, Pa., isn’t receiving any road money despite its 13.8 percent unemployment rate. Yet the military and college community of Riley County, Kan., with its 3.4 percent unemployment, will benefit from about $56 million to build a highway, improve an intersection and restore a historic farmhouse.”

Obama also cut off funding for Corridor H in West Virginia, which went for John McCain.

This was not an isolated incidence. AP also reported: “Altogether, the government is set to spend 50 percent more per person in areas with the lowest unemployment than it will in communities with the highest.”

Interesting. Of course, this is in keeping with what he told his fellow limousine liberals in the San Francisco area a year ago: “Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).”

After implying that rural Pennsylvanians are racist, Obama said: “But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

And now, as president, Obama writes them off.

If you read the article that supports this information you'll see that the poorest counties are being hurt because they don't have shovel-ready projects ready to go. Preparation costs a lot of money but those communities didn't have the funds to prepare projects for implementation. All the sudden the money was available and they weren't in position to do anything about it.

Obama wanted to make a big splash in a hurry. He doesn't have time to wait for those communities that need the money the most to prepare. Stimulus funds are not going to go where they can do the most good.