Your Money Goes to Imaginary Zip Codes

The politicians claiming to “save” the economy with $787 billion in stimulus cash sure are going about it strangely. Last month blogger New Mexico Watchdog found that the tax dollars were being credited for creating jobs in nonexistent Congressional districts. Other bloggers checked their states' shares of stimulus funds and found $6.4 billion allocated to 440 "phantom" Congressional districts.

Now comes a new report of waste:

Closer examination of the latest recovery.gov report for New Mexico shows hundreds of thousands of dollars sent to and credited with creating jobs in zip codes that do not exist in New Mexico or anywhere else. Moreover, funds reported as being spent in New Mexico were given zip codes corresponding to areas in Washington and Oregon.

The recovery.gov site reports that $373,874 was spent in zip code 97052. Unfortunately, this expenditure created zip jobs. But $36,218 was credited with creating 5 jobs in zip code 87258. A cool hundred grand went into zip code 86705, but didn’t result in even one person finding work.

To be fair, some of the zip codes in the government's report do exist. They just don’t exist where the government thinks they exist.

The recovery.gov report also credits New Mexico with $131,139, though the zip codes receiving these funds (but creating no jobs) are in fact located in DuPont, Washington, Richland, Washington, and Gales Creek, Oregon.

Why people would concentrate more power into the hands of government is hard to understand.