Detroit $15M Stimulus Money to Pay Rent, House Homeless: Jennifer Granholm Misstates Jobs Created

Detroit has received $15 million in stimulus money for handouts to enable Detroiter's to pay rent and house homeless. Thousands stood in line to receive their checks at Detroit's Grand Hall on the  west side, but there was no money today. According to the video below, only applications were handed out - no money.  Apparently, 3500 people will be chosen to participate. Doing the math, if this information is correct, each applicant will receive $4,285.71...before administrative costs. Governor Jennifer Granholm misstates or misspeaks or lies about the jobs she and government, have created. It's a laugh a minute. Wish the people standing in line could get a grip on their own reality and the people they vote to "rule" them. See video below.

 Jennifer Granholm

As Rush Limbaugh reported yesterday, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm is all excited about the possibility of creating 40,000 jobs in the "green" sector by 2020. By 2020! 40,000 jobs by 2020! And she admits it. Has even one of the thousands standing in line for government money given a single thought to the p-poor leadership in their state?

 The Washington Post reported that "Granholm has created 163,300 positions, her office says." WAPO didn't fact check. This report by James M. Hohman, writing for the Mackinac Center, says that the actual number is approximately 7,755. That is a huge difference. Does anyone standing in that line for stimulus handouts even pay attention to their Democrat governance?

The article does not explain how Gov. Granholm came up with the larger figure, but it most likely comes from MEGA's "direct jobs" estimates. However, those figures are problematic for a number of reasons.

First, they include job "retention" projects that grant firms discriminatory tax preferences just for not eliminating jobs.

Second, these figures double-count many jobs. For instance, a company called Plastech received MEGA tax credit deals for promising to create jobs, but then filed for bankruptcy, during which a number of its plants were purchased by other firms. These firms also applied for MEGA credit deals and received them — for the same job promises! MEGA includes both sets of job promises in its tallies...

...the largest source of puffing in these figures is that they only count jobs promised by corporations in return for special tax breaks and other benefits offered by the state — and most of those promised jobs never materialize.

The discussion about "double counting" jobs is interesting. Be sure to visit the Mackinac Center article linked above if you care about how government consistently dupes the voters.

In the WAPO article, Granholm is quoted saying:

"We have great bones as a state," she says. "We know how to build stuff. We will build on that strength and diversify this economy. We will lead the nation in creating jobs in renewable energy. We're not going to be viewed as Luddites." 

I'll venture a guess that no one standing in line for stimulus handout knows about the Luddite movement. And they don't need to know, because it has nothing to do with what is happening, and has been happening for years in the Detroit area. No doubt, Granholm is trying to say that modern-day "Luddites" have fought against green technology and thus ruined the auto industry. So what does Granholm plan to do? Forty thousand jobs by 2020 won't do it. As Rush said: "We ought to be creating 40,000 jobs a freaking day in this country!"

Reminders:

This report quotes a Newsweek article.

Since the late 1960s it has become the nation's symbol of urban decay. "How can you begin to describe a disaster the size of the nation's sixth largest city?" a Newsweek reporter asked in 1976. Detroit "is past its industrial prime and tumbling downhill quickly.... At night, the city hollows out: all you can see are the taillights of the middle class, taking their spending money--and much of the city's tax base--to the suburbs....

Detroit "appears to be the victim of a sadistic aerial bombardment--houses burned and vacant, buildings twisted and crumbling, whole city blocks overrun with weeds and the carcasses of discarded automobiles" (pp. 13-14). Today web surfers can take a virtual tour of the "Fabulous Ruins of Detroit," clicking through a stunning series of photographs that document Motown's devastation....

Then came the 1967 riot. Terrified by the violence, fearful of the future, whites fled the city. "Detroit's shift from a prosperous white city to a poor black one was extraordinarily fast," Chafers says. "Within six years of the riot, it had a black majority and a black administration" (p. 22). The oil crisis of the 1970s--and the subsequent collapse of the domestic automobile industry compounded the city's problems by destroying its economic base. The high-paying factory jobs disappeared, leaving Detroit's black majority even more impoverished than it had been and widening the racial divide.

 This from 2007 - "Fifty years ago, American car companies dominated the world, especially the mighty GM, the world's biggest industrial company, many of whose factories were based in Flint, Michigan, 40 miles north of Detroit." A quote from a UAW family: 

" They were loyal members of the autoworkers union, the UAW, which won increasing benefits for its members, with average wages of more than $50,000 plus overtime.

"We respected the union then," she said. "We believed it was the union that had delivered us the American dream."

And this reminder from the same article:  

"In the 1950s the Detroit area had the highest median income, and highest rate of home ownership, of any major US city. But times are very different now"

Today we know that the UAW has broken their companies and the lives of its members.

This headline: 2007 U.S. Auto Sales Dimmest Since 1998:

...major automakers reported lower U.S. sales for December led by a 9 percent slide at Ford Motor Co as the industry closed out its weakest year in over a decade and faced the prospect of deeper declines in 2008.

Michigan has been declining for decades. This 2005 report from the World Socialist Web Site offers some data spanning 2000-2004:

"Detroit is the poorest city in America, with fully one-third of its residents living below the official federal poverty level, a derisory $19,157 in household income for a family of four. Nearly one half of the city's children, 47.8 percent, live below the poverty level.

In 2002, 23.2 percent of Detroit residents were considered poor by the Census Bureau. In a two-year period, according to these figures, some 75,000 to 80,000 more people descended into poverty, a staggering increase....

Tens of thousands of workers in Michigan have lost jobs in manufacturing since 2000, either finding no work at all or lower-paying employment. For example, in Genesee County, home to Flint, the former auto manufacturing center, the proportion of people living in poverty rose from 14.2 to 17 percent in 2003-2004. Providing a little historical perspective, in 1960 one in ten Flint residents lived in poverty; the figure is now one in four. The median household income adjusted for inflation for Wayne County, which includes Detroit, has declined by an astonishing 10 percent since 2000.

Politicians and the UAW can take credit for the ruination of the auto industry in the the U.S. This report from the National Post is blunt:

As the Wall Street Journal noted last week, notice that all the “successful” car producers in the States—Kia, Toyota, BMW, etc.—run factories in states where rules aren’t written as big favours for unions, like Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, where “right to work” laws make it illegal for employees to be forced to belong to unions. The payoff is huge: The Big Three is stuck paying employees about US$30 an hour more at its UAW-run shops then the foreign guys do at their non-union facilities.

Detroit is ranked the No. 1 city, voting liberal, in the U.S. Detroit has elected Democrat mayors since 1962.

Jennifer Granholm Disaster