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Americans for Prosperity’s traffic light claim

By Becky Bowers
May 9, 2012
By Robert Higgs
May 9, 2012

Is our stimulus money paying for traffic lights on Chinese streets?

A TV ad running in Ohio and seven other states blames President Barack Obama for sending stimulus money overseas while Americans are out of work.

“Tell President Obama, American tax dollars should help American taxpayers,” the narrator says. Instead, $2.3 billion in tax credits funded jobs in Mexico, Finland and China, the ad claims.

Americans for Prosperity, a group dedicated to “educating citizens about economic policy” that works closely with tea party activists and has been funded by the conservative Koch family, released the ad April 26, 2012.

We previously checked out two claims from the ad, about stimulus tax credits supposedly funding a plant in Mexico (Pants on Fire) and paying for jobs in Finland (False).

In our third fact-check from the ad, we looked to see if those tax credits included “tens of millions of dollars to build traffic lights in China.” We rated that claim Mostly False.

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