Here’s your sign!

I’ve been meaning for months to stop and take a photo of those signs on North Durango Drive, the ones touting nearby construction but where the only visible sign of work is possibly some striping and a mile or so of orange cones.

I was inspired by an editorial in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal that made the same point I’d been thinking: “Perhaps you’ve noticed the green billboards that say some version of 'This Project Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,' often in all capital letters. The billboards don’t say 'Re-elect Barack Obama in 2012,' but they’re close enough for government work.”

With 190,000 projects funded by the stimulus money, WSJ estimates “tens of millions of dollars have probably been spent telling Americans how their money is being spent.”

Your tax money in action, sort of.

Oh, yes, the sign on the back tells us the project is a prevailing wage one, which simply means the job, whatever it was, had to pay workers the so-called prevailing wage, which is union scale or above usually. With people now willing to work for less, this “job” probably cost twice what it should have.

It’s just our money. Thank you, Congress, we’d’ve just wasted it on cheap booze now that you’ve driven us to drink.