Romney's Smackdown of Teachers, Firefighters, Police Is No Gaffe

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10. it's like unemployment insurance payments.There's an expectation that their economy will stabilize

. . . along with the aggregate effect the dollars spent in the state have on their overall economy and the nation's overall economy. The purpose of the Act was an economic stimulus (national and local). It was constructed in a way which allowed state and local officials to preserve jobs which would have been lost in the leaner times of the economic downturn.

It's not as if the federal government was going to be able to dictate to the states which investments in their community they deemed appropriate. You can likely think of hundreds of ways to spend the money to suit your viewpoint, but it was the states which chose the projects and human infrastructure to receive the money. The expectation was that it would be a stopgap while they rebuilt their individual economies.

Thing is, here you are still arguing past the point. The stimulus bill had the effect that the president and economists -- including the non-partisan CBO -- intended it to have; and the results were an averted recession; a sustained and growing workforce; and an aid to the economy.

President Obama has echoed my own view that government isn't just about balancing the books. Their responsibility was to make certain that they not only gained a financial foothold, but that the economy continued to grow; that people in the way of the economic collapse in these states weren't left out of the beneficence of the recovery legislation.