have said and this man who asked this question, lars, let me put this to you, implicit in his question was, you know, i m sure president obama you understand, and i m sure people went over this with you when you launched this program that it s very tough to get through a lot of the red tape when you actually try to put this money to work. oh, yes, that s why i think this is baloney, because number one, of the 860 billion only 30 billion went into infrastructure, roads, bridges and other forms of infrastructure. the rest of it basically went into the pockets of unions, martha. what the man was saying to the president was. lars, you re actually wrong. hold on rob. rob, let me finish. what he was saying was, mr. president government regulations are keeping us from getting business going. the president keeps loading regulations on, that s hurting our ability to get back to work. and most of that money, rob, 5% went for infrastructure, the rest went as political payoffs. frankly i t
and rob robeson. what did you make of the moment. i thought it was a moment of levity when you look at what obama was facing. many times when you run for office you have grand ideas but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, to the local level you realize that the red tape, the issues that you are dealing with are well beyond what you are concerned with. we do know this the money was made available to all the moo nice paplts, all the different states, it was a matter of whether they would take it and use it. when you talk shovel ready, how are they going to use the shovels? the shovels were prepared, the program was there, it was the local areas that refused to take advantage of the money. if they did they put it in a long line of different things, far away from what president obama wanted to do with the stimulus package. martha: somebody tweeted to me moments ago saying when you spend $800 billion you better understand the regulatory environment that you re throwing that money into.
does get it. let s look at the numbers as they stand. as we are right now 75,000 different projects have started across the united states. they ve either been obligated or contracted to get moving. for every dollar invested we expect a dollar fifty back in ripple effects to return. the money has been out there and it has been spent. martha: that is two and a half years. monies have gone from airports to highways to the epa, to clean water and air to a variety of different programs, job core. all of the monies have been out there and are available. mart that. rob is uninformed. rob is uninformed. 30 billion of the 860 went to airports, bridges, roads and other infrastructure. the rest of it went somewhere else. and the fact is the president was laughing, he laughs that nervous laugh when he doesn t know what to say because he is a former professor and all of this i guess nonsense works on paper
lars and rob, we ll pick this up again next week, shall we? thank you very much, gentlemen. good to see you. we are getting word now that the prosecution is reportedly close to resting in the casey anthony case. we ve had one eye on this throughout the entire morning because this is the final day for their arguments. in three minutes from now geraldo rivera who has been watching this in the courtroom all morning will join us to tell us what is going as the case reaches this critical crossroads right before they turn this over to the defense in this case. that is coming up right after the break. also, we are now awaiting the release on a botched u.s. gun program that intentionally put guns into the hands of drug cartel members to try to find out where they went. unfortunately it led to the murder of americans in some cases. we re going to talk to the congressman who is leading that house investigation, s very serious accusation stkpwhr-s
should join congressman weiner in the unemployment line with 13 million other americans. martha: that s a whole other story. we re not going to get into that here for right now. rob, let me just go to sort of the heart of this in some ways. there has been an accusation about president obama, that he s out of touch with this to a certain extent. and that may be reflected, you know, even in that moment of levity and the ability to say, oh, gee it didn t really work out the way we hoped. it reminded me of a time several years ago during a course respond dense dinner when the bush administration showed a video that made fun for searching for weapons of mass destruction under toubls in the white house. the joke went over like a led balloon. american people don t like to joke about things that are of great serious nature to him. i think that s why this moment and that little levity. i m sure it s not the way that he intended for it to come out but it does smack of know getting it. that s the