The Secret Message of Stimulus Spending

Even the feds don't believe they can create jobs

The idea behind the $787 billion stimulus bill is that government can create jobs by spending money. For now, let's ignore fact, history, and economic theory and assume that government spending can actually create jobs.

In that case, we should expect the government to invest relatively more money in the states that have the highest unemployment rates and less money in the states with lower unemployment rates. So let's check the data.

Using numbers from President Obama's website Recovery.gov and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this chart plots the amount of stimulus funds spent per person in each state and the corresponding unemployment rate in that state. The solid blue line shows what the allocation of funds should look like if the administration was allocating relatively more money to the states with higher unemployment rates.   

Yet, with a few exceptions, the data show that this is not the case. Many higher-unemployment states are getting far fewer stimulus dollars than lower-unemployment states.

Take Michigan, for instance. Michigan's 15.2 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the country. So far, it has received $403 per person in stimulus funds. That's above the average stimulus per person across all states ($326).  However, it's lower than the $409 per person that the state of Vermont, a state with relatively low unemployment (6.8 percent), has received so far. Michigan's per-person take is also much lower than the $707 per person the District of Columbia received. D.C.'s unemployment rate is 9.9 percent.

Now look at the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the country: North Dakota. It's getting $253 per person with a 4.3 percent unemployment rate. Many other states are receiving roughly the same amount of stimulus funds per person despite much higher rates of unemployment.   

Which suggests that stimulus funds are being allocated without thought to the level of unemployment within states. If government spending could in fact create jobs, then the problem of unemployment could be mitigated by distributing funds to states based on their relative unemployment levels.  

But that's not being done at all. Instead, funds are being distributed randomly, as quickly as possible, among the states. That in turn suggests something else: Even the federal government doesn't believe the myth that government spending can actually create jobs.

Veronique de Rugy is an economist at The Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a columnist for Reason.