Porkulus: The Monster that ate DC

The "stimulus bill" is a liberal dream: A $900 billion pork platter that spreads taxpayer money like fertilizer in hopes that a thousand social programs will bloom. Here are some excerpts from WSJ:

Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects.

by 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.

The larger fiscal issue here is whether this spending bonanza will become part of the annual "budget baseline" that Congress uses as the new floor when calculating how much to increase spending the following year, and into the future.

Peter Ferrara catalogs the pork in the bill. It runs the gamut: Money for ACORN, Headstart, National Endowment for the Arts, increased welfare spending, government health care for families making four times the poverty rate ...

Don't believe all those conservative and libertarian naysayers? Then listen to unabashed liberal Democrat and Obama cheerleader Ron Brownstein writing in National Journal:

To call the economic legislation now moving through Congress a stimulus bill obscures its full implications. The measure represents the most ambitious effort in decades to swell public spending on domestic priorities such as education, infrastructure, and scientific research that many Democrats consider the foundation stones of sustained prosperity.

But it also provides the biggest surge in long-term public investment since President Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s.

Liberals are drooling at this once in a lifetime opportunity to grab double fistfuls of taxpayer money, haul it out in tractor trailer loads and shower those who didn't earn it. Their aim is bigger government intruding upon the smallest nooks and crannies of our already big brother supervised lives. Like Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel said, "You can't let a good crisis go to waste."

"No president in my lifetime has had this opportunity to fund public investments," says Robert Reich, a University of California (Berkeley) public policy professor who advised Obama's campaign.

There are some voices of sanity crying out in the wilderness. Eamon Javers and Jim Vandehei over at Politico sum up the argument of the Do-Nothings.

For the Do-Nothings, the argument isn’t about economic nuance, it’s about right and wrong. They say that borrowing more money to finance a stimulus package will pass a crushing and possibly permanent debt load on to the next generation. “The question is,” says Chris Edwards, the director of tax policy studies at Cato, “is this morally proper?”

“The economy was too big. It was all phantom wealth borrowed from abroad,” says Andrew Schiff, an investment consultant at Euro Pacific Capital and a card-carrying member of the stand-tall-against-the-stimulus lobby. “All this stimulus money is geared toward getting consumers spending and borrowing again. But spending and borrowing were the problem in the first place.”

The Do-Nothing Crowd also points to some of the hidden upsides of the recession — developments they say are already helping position the U.S. economy for a recovery.

The most noticeable impact is that housing prices are coming down to a more sustainable level. For first-time buyers, this is reopening a path to homeownership that had been all but blocked by hyper-inflated prices.

...weak companies that have problems competing are being weeded out of the system.

...companies have been forced to face the reality that they haven’t been making products that customers actually want to buy. (think GM)

American families are finally starting to pay down the dangerously high debt levels they’ve accumulated.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Edward Prescott of Arizona State University agrees. “Congress has to do what people want, and it’s clear that the people want this stimulus,” Prescott says. “But I just wish the people would tell them: ‘Don’t do it.’”

The Wall Street Welfare Queens got their chance to loot the treasury under President Bush's reign, now the Socialist Democrats get their crack at taxpayer money in a President Obama joint. A bi-partisan screwjob is still a screwjob nonetheless.

Links
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/nj_20090131_4685.php
http://www.businessweek.com/print/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jan2009/db20090127_702149.htm
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/18068.html
http://www.cato.org/fiscalreality
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/01/28/good-morning-suckers/print
http://readthestimulus.org/