“Stimulus” Jobs Costing $191,574 Each In North Dakota, More Than 73% Went To State Government

According to the Bismarck Tribune today the federal “stimulus” spending in North Dakota has created 2,099 jobs. According to Recovery.gov, the Obama administration’s transparency website for stimulus spending, North Dakota has received $402,114,219 of its allocated $836,182,546 in “stimulus” deficit spending.
That works out to $191,574 for every “stimulus” job. And remember, these jobs probably weren’t created. At this point, the Obama administration has dropped the “jobs created or saved” metric and is now using the “jobs funded” metric. Meaning that anyone working for an organization that got funds can be counted as a “job funded” whether their job was newly created or not.
What’s more, looking at a listing of the organizations that got the “stimulus” deficit spending, government got most of the money. Just counting up the funds awarded to government agencies listed in the top 20 recipients indicates that they got 73% of the total funds.
I didn’t go down the list and add up all of the government recipients of “stimulus” money, but it’s clear just from that sample of top recipients that most of this “stimulus” went straight to the state government. Thus inflating it and its cost to North Dakota taxpayers going forward.
We didn’t need this money. North Dakota has the strongest employment numbers in the nation. Our political leadership (the same ones who accepted the money, I’m looking at you Governor Hoeven) brags about that all the time.
So why did we take these hundreds of millions of deficit-spent money? Other than because it enriched our state government and those private interests well-connected enough to get a slice of the pie?