Republican Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock was no fan of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which passed last year and he far from relishes the constant reminder of the stimulus from the signposts that litter the country’s landscape.
To save America from his scourge, Schock submitted a proposal last week to stop the funding for advertising for the stimulus with signs. The proposal became the House’s YouCut weekly winner.
“This week’s winner, a proposal developed by Aaron Schock, was an idea that we saw from dozens of email submissions,” said Republican Whip Eric Cantor in a statement to the press. ”These bright green signs are impossible to miss, but they don’t do anything to spur job creation or economic growth of any kind. As YouCut voter Leslie wrote, ‘it’s bad enough that they wasted my kids’ money on the stimulus, but now they are wasting even more of my kids money to brag about it.’”
The statement continued, “To make matters worse, no information exits as to how much all of these signs cost taxpayers, but reports indicate that potentially tens of millions of dollars have been spent. This week’s proposal would eliminate funding of the signs and require federal agencies to not only report the costs of the signs, but also find their own administrative cuts to recapture the funds.”
YouCut is a program started by Cantor to reduce government waste. Each week, YouCut provides online voters with a list of five proposed cuts. Voters then choose what issues they would like to see Congress address and the next week House Republicans force a vote on that proposal.
Schock’s bill, H.R. 5679 “End the Stimulus Advertisement Act,” would prohibit funding for any additional “stimulus” signs, and would reduce the budgets of each federal agency by the amount they have already spent on these signs.
According to the congressman, less than 8% of the stimulus actually went to infrastructure improvements and $20 million of that went to the signs.
“Reports have stated these signs can cost taxpayers up to $10,000 each and my home state of Illinois has spent over $650,000 on these signs,” Schock said in an email to The Daily Caller. “That’s tens of millions spent nationwide, without creating one single job. We don’t need to spend taxpayer money on propaganda.”
The legislation failed to pass in the House last week but it received bipartisan support with all House Republicans and 11 Democrats voting for the proposal.
Though it did not pass last week, Schock is hopeful that it will eventually pass. He is currently in the process of collecting more co-sponsors for the bill.
Dave Natonski, communications director for Schock, told The Daily Caller, “We will keep pushing it and hopefully after the [midterm] elections we will have a lot more Republicans to get it through.”
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