On February 17th of this year President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This 787 billion dollar stimulus plan was devised to do two main things, create new jobs, and help put money back into the middle class American's wallet.

You would need a lot of stats and figures to show exactly how much went to who, and what was designated for what. In the end, Americans have a little less taken out of each check, and people hit by hard times have, in most cases, been given extended unemployment benefits?

So where is the rest of the money?

Well, it is supposed to be rationed up between to each state. The state then goes and grants and certain amount to each county/municipality. Then it is up to them on how they want to spend it. The majority of the projects that are chosen are that of infrastructure and energy related.

But, leave it to our government, from the local level all the way to Washington to screw things up, and waste more money that could be used somewhere else.

I was glancing at a report done by U.S. Senator Tom Coburn on what states are wasting the money on. There were some gems to say the least. $57 Million in Ohio for planning highway development, not the actual building of them, just the planning. Nearly 600 thousand dollars to a town in New York state to help the homeless. The catch, the town has no homeless. Finally, one of my favorites is in Missouri, the Show Me State. Nearly 500 K for new toilets at the Mark Twain National Forest. I guess a bear doesn't shit in the woods in Missouri.

All are quick examples of wasteful spending, but in some cases, such as in one small Oklahoma town, the "free money" is actually costing residents more.

In Perkins, Oklahoma the residents simply needed a new wastewater treatment plant, and they were all set to break ground on the new 5 millions dollar project. Then the town made its biggest mistake, by asking the government for free money.

1.5 million dollars was given to the project, and the town was ecstatic. That was until the folks picked up their local paper and found out the catch. Since the government had its hands on the project, the new plant was going to have to meet several new federal requirements, thus vaulting the project to an estimated 7.2 million dollars.

Who gets to pay the difference you ask? Well it's the citizens of Perkins. Their utility bills have gone up almost 60% according to the local paper, The Perkins Journal.

Other great examples of our great leaders putting our money to work include fixing little or never used bridges in rural Wisconsin. They currently have over 1200 structurally deficient bridges in the state. Many of them well traveled. But instead of fixing them, they are fixing 37 rural bridges. My favorite of these bridges is one that links a local gold course to a watering hole, and that is according to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

My home state of Illinois I am not even going to go into the 1 billion dollar earmark that was handed to them by the President, but I am gonna to a 150k waste. There are a number of road construction sites throughout Illinois, and many of them are needed. But do we really need to spend 150k on signs that tell drivers that the project is funded by the ARRA? I can think of a lot of other areas where 150k could be used.

The bottom line is that there is wasteful spending on a daily basis, and not from our leaders at the government level, but from us a consumers too. We as a society and a country need to better prioritize what we need and what we want. If we can do so as a country, then just maybe, these economic hardships will go away and we will prosper in the future.

But until then, we will have 150 million dollar world's brightest x-ray in New York, 20k dollars in frozen fish sperm in South Dakota, and a 500 thousand dollar skatepark in Rhode Island.

As Dennis Miller would say, this is just my opinion, I could be wrong!