Top Stories Milwaukee

Just how stimulated are we? Republicans and Democrats continue to debate the impact of the stimulus funding on the economy, an issue that may loom large in the fall elections. Even as conservatives trot out foolish sounding examples of federal spending, liberal groups are compiling info to sell us on the impact of the funding in Wisconsin. So who’s right?

Perhaps the most comprehensive effort is a new website WisRecovers.org, detailing awards in the state county-by-county, from the smallest project to the largest. Launched last week by the liberal Institute for Wisconsin’s Future (IWF), the site tracks the $8 billion Wisconsin received from the 2009 stimulus act, which approved a total of $787 billion in spending. Milwaukee County got about 17 percent of Wisconsin’s $8 billion (about $1.37 billion) and the biggest chunk of that, 23 percent, has gone to energy projects, largely because Johnson Controls, a world leader in the manufacturing of batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles, is based here.

The company received almost $300 million last fall to help build a new factory for the batteries in Holland, Mich. Johnson Controls is partnering with Saft, a French battery maker, in the conversion of an existing plant in Michigan. This was the largest grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of a large stimulus program for such batteries.

Milwaukee Public Schools take up the second, third, fourth and fifth highest slots on the website’s ranking of the largest stimulus awards. In total, the county received about $258 million for education, including about $21 million for post-secondary schools. Small business loans, transportation and housing/urban development each accounted for 4 percent of the county’s stimulus money. The county’s sixth-largest award was $25.7 million for 45 new Milwaukee County Transit System buses.

Also tracking the stimulus money is the Wisconsin Budget Project, part of the liberal Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. Project analyst Tamarine Cornelius says the focus on infrastructure projects, which often receive some of the harshest criticism, distracts from other stimulus benefits and gives the overall legislation a bad rap. “It seems like a well-kept secret that a large amount of the Recovery Act spending went straight to people,” she says.

Individual benefits in the state from the stimulus act exceeded $3 billion between February 2009 and May 2010, according to the Budget Project report. It tallied the top six programs (pdf), including increased unemployment insurance and FoodShare benefits. The largest benefit was the Making Work Pay tax credit for workers, which expired this year.

“These direct benefits have helped mitigate the recession’s impact on Wisconsin families,” the report says, noting that most of the programs are drawing to a close. “It remains to be seen how the state’s low and middle-income families will be affected by the loss of these benefits.”

IWF Executive Director Karen Royster says people are often surprised to learn how much they’ve benefitted from the stimulus – often because they didn’t realize the Making Work Pay credit was deducted from the federal income tax withheld from their paychecks. “This was much better economics than PR,” Royster says of the credit.

Yet criticism of stimulus projects abounds. Earlier this month, as reported in NewsBuzz, an analysis of 100 allegedly misguided stimulus projects released by U.S. senators Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) and John McCain (R-Arizona) included a Main Street beautification project in Twin Lakes, Wis., along with a few other choice projects, including hundreds of thousands of dollars for unneeded window shutters and choreography software.

There’s even criticism of the Johnson Controls project in Holland, Michigan. In an ironic development for a green energy project, city officials there are attempting to expand a coal power plant to meet the increased demand expected once the new Johnson plant and a similar one under construction in the city go online. “You hate to see a dirty coal plant fuel these two new clean energy facilities,” a Sierra Club representative tells The Holland Sentinel. City officials have locked horns in court with state regulators, who are attempting to block the expansion over air pollution concerns.

A recent story in The Weekly Standard conservative news magazine on Scott Walker, Milwaukee County executive and leading Republican candidate for governor, argues that voters in Wisconsin aren’t drinking the stimulus Kool-Aid. “The climb out (of recession) has been anything but easy in Wisconsin or the rest of the country. Voters overwhelmingly believe the stimulus was ineffective and with this fall’s midterm elections shaping up to be a referendum on the size and scope of government, few elected Democrats are defending it,” the story says.

Walker has objected to spending an $800 million stimulus award to link Madison and Milwaukee with high-speed rail. The magazine depicts him chatting with protestors under the Hoan Bridge, agreeing with them that it should be repaired before anything is spent on the rail line. Milwaukee Mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett says the stimulus money will go to another state if Wisconsin stops the project.

The Weekly Standard offered no evidence to back up its contention that Wisconsin voters believe the stimulus funding hasn’t worked, yet the story goes on to say that Democratic candidates, including Barrett, are largely keeping mum on the stimulus out of fear of its unpopularity.

Nor did the story note the findings of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which estimated last week that in the second quarter of 2010 (April through June), the stimulus act decreased unemployment by between 0.7 and 1.8 percent while growing the gross domestic product by between 1.7 and 4.5 percent.

Of course, those statistics are no comfort to all those people who weren’t lifted out of unemployment by stimulus funds.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.