Not a stimulus, but the biggest pork barrel in history

If you think that the Democrats are concerned about solving the economic crisis, think again. They are simply using the crisis as a golden opportunity to be themselves, which means, to spend other people’s money on their own interest groups. Indeed, I think it can be fairly said that the Democrats’ view of the economic downturn and the unprecedentedly vast “stimulus” plan supposedly intended to fix it, is identical to Gov. Ron Blagojevich’s view of the vacant U.S. Senate seat to which he had the sole power to appoint a replacement:

“I’ve got this thing and it’s f——— golden and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for f——— nothing. I’m not gonna do it.”

Below are excerpts from a must-read Wall Street Journal article that will remove any notion in your head that the Congressional Democrats and Obama are responsible persons who deserve to be in charge of anything.

We’ve looked it over, and even we can’t quite believe it. There’s $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There’s even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons….

[B]y our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus. And even many of these projects aren’t likely to help the economy immediately. As Peter Orszag, the President’s new budget director, told Congress a year ago, “even those [public works] that are ‘on the shelf’ generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy.”

Most of the rest of this project spending will go to such things as renewable energy funding ($8 billion) or mass transit ($6 billion) that have a low or negative return on investment. Most urban transit systems are so badly managed that their fares cover less than half of their costs. However, the people who operate these systems belong to public-employee unions that are campaign contributors to … guess which party?

Here’s another lu-lu: Congress wants to spend $600 million more for the federal government to buy new cars. Uncle Sam already spends $3 billion a year on its fleet of 600,000 vehicles. Congress also wants to spend $7 billion for modernizing federal buildings and facilities. The Smithsonian is targeted to receive $150 million; we love the Smithsonian, too, but this is a job creator?

Another “stimulus” secret is that some $252 billion is for income-transfer payments—that is, not investments that arguably help everyone, but cash or benefits to individuals for doing nothing at all. There’s $81 billion for Medicaid, $36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits, $20 billion for food stamps, and $83 billion for the earned income credit for people who don’t pay income tax. While some of that may be justified to help poorer Americans ride out the recession, they aren’t job creators….

Oh, and don’t forget education, which would get $66 billion more. That’s more than the entire Education Department spent a mere 10 years ago and is on top of the doubling under President Bush. Some $6 billion of this will subsidize university building projects….

This is supposed to be a new era of bipartisanship, but this bill was written based on the wish list of every living—or dead—Democratic interest group. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, “We won the election. We wrote the bill.” So they did. Republicans should let them take all of the credit.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 28, 2009 09:59 AM | Send