Falls Church resident Bob Lofton-Thur told the council that the money would go to “create a city-wide platform for U.S.-based clean energy technology companies and commercially viable products to be demonstrated and results measured, monitored and evaluated for financial and environmental effectiveness.”

Read that sentence again, if you dare. It’s like something spit out by a random word generator. It goes on and on, sounds as if it’s making a point, but in fact says nothing.

Still, Falls Church must have a long-standing desire to become a green city, right? Stimulus money was, after all, supposed to be aimed at “shovel-ready” projects. Well, not exactly.

City council member Nader Baroukh told the weekly town newspaper that he’d never heard of the idea until a week before the vote. “I am pretty well plugged into what’s going on in this community, but this caught me off guard,” he said.

And there’s the “stimulus” plan in a nutshell. Federal lawmakers are handing out money; why shouldn’t communities line up with their hands out? $25 million is a lot of money in Falls Church, more than a third of the city’s total annual budget of $70 million. Creating jobs never comes into play.

The government is using a formula: for every $92,000 the government spends, it says that a job has been “saved or created.” There’s no reason to believe that’s true, and there’ll never be a way to count the number of jobs “saved or created.”

Spending money isn’t difficult. And it’s even easier when you’re spending somebody else’s money. Some policymakers are now saying they might consider another “stimulus” bill, since the first one isn’t working. They’re also eager to saddle us with a global-warming bill and a federalized health care system.

Americans shouldn’t be surprised. They should be outraged. And they need to let our leaders know.