Just ask Campbelsville, KY shoe store owner Buddy Moore, who accepted an $889.60 order from the Army to provide nine pairs of work boots for a porkulus project. The Army Corps of Engineers then called the shoe owner, according to the Wall Street Journal, to demand that he fill out his Recovery Act paperwork, showing how many jobs he had created or saved. Next the government called back to see how those forms were coming along.
Moore has been filling orders for the Army for decades, but has never seen anything like the paperwork required by the Recovery Act. He asked his daughter, Paula Moore-Kirby, to help him with the on-line form.
Moore-Kirby spent eight hours trying to fill out the form as accurately and completely as possible. Eight hours for an eight hundred dollar government contract. After calling the assistance hot line, and told that she could revise the filing if necessary, Moore's daughter reported that the store's share of stimulus funds had created or saved nine jobs -- because Moore sold the Army nine pairs of boots.
Moore-Kirby wonders how the job creation question should have been answered: "Did we create zero? Is it creating a job because they have boots and go out and work for the Corps?"
Little did Moore know when he agreed to sell the Army nine pairs of boots that he was about to become the poster-child for the Recovery Act's red tape and inflated claims of job creation.
1 comment:
Hey Bridget.
I was at the Association for Corporate Growth Meeting on Tuesday at the Marriott when John Yarmouth was invited to defend his healthcare vote.
I thought it would be like our other ACG meetings, when the speaker invited "hand raised" questions at the end.
Yarmouth's people would have nothing of the kind. Yarmouth proceeded to talk down to a roomful of deal guys (I saw mouths agape), probably 50% of them MBA's and an other 25% lawyers, telling them that the whole issue was "too complicated for them," and that "Congress would figure it out, and if we didn't figure it out now, we will later."
It was an astonishing display of born-on-third-base hubris. Here's a guy who's never held a real job in his life, trying to sketch a tale of false economics to a room full of deal guys. I saw mouths agape!
When I saw that they had no intention of taking any real questions from the highly qualified audience (who were asked to "write down" their questions and then they were promptly ignored for a "summarizing" by the quisling moderator) I walked out of there.
The man is a monstrosity. Truly, he is such a hardcore ideologue that he doesn't care what his constituency thinks.
He knows better, and that's that.
Please, please tell me we have someone to run against this silver spoon socialist in 2010!
Post a Comment