Government agencies, both state and federal, have finalized plans for spending the billions of stimulus dollars appropriated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but in numerous cases only as little as 1% of the cash has actually been spent by the government and deposited in individual or corporate bank accounts, thereby flowing back into the economic activity of the country. As a result, in the construction industry north of the Mason Dixon line, thousands of stimulus projects won't see notices to proceed until next spring.
The reason: cash was appropriated for bricks and mortar, or concrete and rebar, but not for the federal and state bureaucrats needed to process the paperwork and cut the checks. In the inimitable words of Caltrans Deputy Program Manager Earl Sealberg: "If we go any faster, we're going to be breaking people." So reality comes crashing down on the optimism of the Obama administration - it actually does take more man hours to spend a trillion dollars than it does to spend a few billion in the same time period.
The reason: cash was appropriated for bricks and mortar, or concrete and rebar, but not for the federal and state bureaucrats needed to process the paperwork and cut the checks. In the inimitable words of Caltrans Deputy Program Manager Earl Sealberg: "If we go any faster, we're going to be breaking people." So reality comes crashing down on the optimism of the Obama administration - it actually does take more man hours to spend a trillion dollars than it does to spend a few billion in the same time period.
