Say Anything Blog

Here’s something that’s undoubtedly happening all over the country.  Recently the Grand Forks Herald reported that the Grand Forks County Commission had declared their area an official “economic recovery zone” thus entitling them to roughly $30,000,000 in federal “stimulus” money.  In order to be an “economic recovery zone” the county must admit that it has significant problems with poverty, unemployment and home foreclosures.

Now we can debate about whether or not government spending can, in fact, stimulate an economy (it can’t), but setting that point aside, does anyone really think those conditions exist in Grand Forks County?

According to the North Dakota Policy Council, they don’t:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment rates for the Grand Forks metro-area are at 5.0%, hardly high, and hardly cause for concern. According to 3-year estimates from the US Census Bureau between the years of 2005 and 2007, 8.3% of families in Grand Forks County were living in poverty, which is well below the national average of 9.8%.

Tom Dennis of the Grand Forks Herald recently interviewed Keith Reitmeier the area’s Job Service North Dakota director. On October 17th, when asked about unemployment in the area, he said that there are about 850 job openings.

This all isn’t to say that Grand Forks hasn’t been affected by the recession; rather, I wanted to point out that Grand Forks County is far from being “distressed”. Just look at recent headlines that appeared in the Grand Forks Herald: “Local Business: Bucking the Trend” and “Moody’s says recession has ended in Grand Forks”.

So, essentially, the county leaders in Grand Forks decided that they’d lie about the economic conditions in their area in order to get their hands on $30,000,000 in deficit-spent federal funds.

Like it’s free money or something and not money borrowed from international creditors like Brazil and China against the as-yet-unearned tax dollars of our children.