Where Kentucky Ranks in Stimulus Funds

Pro Publica Journalism in the Public Interest has performed an outstanding service by breaking the entire $750 billion stimulus package down to the county level, making it easy to compare states and counties by per capita spending against unemployment rates and by type of project.

Here's the state-by-state breakdown. The big winners are not who you might expect.

Kentucky, for example, ranks 34th in per-capita spending at $345 ($1.473 billion total), although its unemployment rate of 10.9 percent is tied for 8th in the nation.

The county breakdown for Kentucky is equally unbalanced:

The highest per-capita spending goes to Trigg ($2,419), Franklin ($2,266), Breathitt ($1,491) and Washington ($1,457) Counties.

And although Trigg County has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state - 15.8 percent - the county with the highest unemployment rate - Jackson, with 18 percent unemployment - gets a miserly $232 per person in stimulus funds. Breathitt also has double-digit unemployment at 11.4 percent, but Franklin, the home of the state capital, has a comparatively low unemployment rate of 9.6 percent.

Don't forget that the reason there is not a closer relationships between stimulus funding and unemployment rates is that congressional repugs (Mitch McConnell, Jim Bunning, Hal Rogers, Geoff Davis, Brett Guthrie, Ed Whitfield) and Blue Dogs (Ben Chandler) demanded President Obama and Democrats cut hundreds of billions of dollars in unemployment compensation originally included in the stimulus bill.

Via Huffington Post.