I Can Hear RWNJ Dog Whistles, Can You?
Here we go with more on Fox News’ promotion of The Washington Examiner’s 10 part expose of Obama’s hidden … uh, … deepest desires and intentions. I guess.
To that end, The Examiner says 31 Obama campaign bundlers received clean-energy loans and grants totaling more than $16 billion. The auto bailout favored the United Auto Workers — over secured creditors — and eight of the 10 states getting the most contracts from the stimulus program were heavily Democratic.
First, let’s deal with the last part of that paragraph, the part where Obama has favoured Democrat heavy States over Republican States when handing out stimulus funds.
It seems pretty logical that those States with the highest unemployment rates and the largest populations should be the ones who receive the most stimulus funding.
When we look at the top 10 States for total funds received we get the following:
Top 10 by funds.
The left-most column is the difference between the percentage of the vote Obama got in 2008 and the percentage of the vote McCain got. Positive numbers are Democrat leaning States and negative numbers are Republican leaning States.
In the top 10 there are 9 Democrat leaning and 1 Republican leaning State. Although my numbers are slightly different, they seem to match up with the Examiner’s numbers fairly well.
However, that isn’t the full story. Larger States will get more money, simply as a function of their larger population so going by total amounts is misleading. Let’s take a look at the top 10 by per capita funding.
Top 10 by per capita
We can see that there are 5 Democrat States and 5 Republican States. Using highest per capita or highest unemployment rates is a much more accurate representation of how the stimulus was apportioned.
Here is the top 20 by unemployment rate at the end of 2008.
Top Twenty by 2008 Unemployment
From this it’s easy to see that those with the highest unemployment voted predominately Democrat yet only two of those States are in the top 10 by per capita.
There is no indication that Obama rewarded the States who voted for him with inappropriately high stimulus amounts. The Examiner has taken the Fox News template and run with it. Unfortunately for them they’ve also followed Fox right into the ditch.