About whether there should be a correlation, you’re reading too much into it, but I’ll also partially concede the point. I personally think stimulus should go to making us more competitive in the world market. It bothers me that we’re ordering windmills made in China. But I imagine many people wonder if stimulus spending DOES match up with unemployment. I know I do, so I thought I’d graph it. Additionally I am only tracking STIMULUS. The bailouts of GM and Chrysler undoubtedly helped Michigan more than any other state and the dollars spent there are not shown here.

Regarding the DC anomaly, $200K per unemployed in DC is a tremendous amount of pork. It was a shocker to me. If true, this is national news stuff, yet this is the first I’ve heard of it. Unfortunately it is off topic from where I wanted this article to go so instead of detouring I did indeed soft pedal it. Though I did find some small indication of the sort of accounting errors suggested above. But as I said I didn’t dig into it. A deeper dive may be the subject of a future article.