You know, one of the things I liked to hear O talk about during the campaign was his plan to improve infrastructure.
He said - and I believed him - that infrastructure improvements could create lots of jobs and the improvements are needed.I actually liked that idea.
Infrastructure in the U.S. is a bit on the crumbly side. We do need lots of work on roads and bridges and sewers and the like.
So why not put a bunch of people to work on infrastructure projects?
A good idea.
Comes now the stimulus package. A perfect time for O to put his foot down and demand lots of spending on infrastructure.
But no.
The bill passed in the House Wednesday includes $30 billion for roads and bridges, $9 billion for public transit and $1 billion for inter-city rail. That's less than 5 percent of the $825 billion package's total spending. (While we're on the subject of huge numbers, the Congressional Budget Office points out that after we pay the interest on the loans we're getting from foreign countries to fund the stimulus package, its cost balloons to $1.2 trillion.)
So I guess I was a little disappointed.
I poked around in the stimulus package. It's quite massive, like, 647 pages. It's at : http://www.docuticker.com/?p=24473
What I noticed is that there aren't really a lot of earmarks in there. That's what we normally refer to as pork barrel spending. That's when a Congressman - take ours for example, Third District U.S. House Representative Mark Souder - would add something like a $2 million indoor skating rink for Warsaw onto the bill.
There's really not much of that as far I can see. But there are a whole bunch of government programs that probably wouldn't pass if they were put to a straight up and down vote.
There's $3 billion for prevention and wellness programs, including $335 million for sexually transmitted disease education and prevention; $400 million for NASA scientists to conduct climate-change research; $600 million for cars for government workers; $150 million for renovation at the Smithsonian; $10 million for bike and walking trails; $650 million for "alternative energy technologies, energy efficiency enhancements and deferred maintenance at federal facilities"; $600 million for grants for diesel emission reduction; $800 million to clean up Superfund sites; $200 million for plug-in car stations; $1.5 billion for "green schools"; $1 billion to the Community Oriented Policing Services hiring programs; $2.7 billion in National Institutes of Health research grants; $75 million for smoking cessation; $5 billion for "Neighborhood Stabilization Programs"; $1 billion for the follow-up to the 2010 census; $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects; $650 million more to pay for digital TV conversion coupons; $150 billion - virtually doubling the Department of Education's current budget - of emergency spending in grants to college students, special education Head Start and special education.
And then there's the $2.25 billion for national parks. The House appropriations committee chairman is David R. Obey. Obey's son, Craig, is a senior vice president for the National Parks Conservation Association - a huge advocate for national parks funding.
The $2.25 billion stuffed in the stimulus package was nearly equal to the National Park Service's total annual budget and is three times the $802 million the Senate appropriations committee approved for parks in its stimulus bill.
A spokeswoman for chairman Obey said the funding for parks had nothing to do with the chairman's relationship with his son. OK, well, glad we got that cleared up.
That's just a sampling, but you get the picture.
Now, one could argue, of course, that renovating the Smithsonian and showering money on parks will create jobs.
But those are not the kind of economy boosting, long-haul jobs that O was talking about on the campaign trail.
And pouring all that money into existing government programs doesn't create squat. The programs already exist and already have employees.
The bill also includes $87 billion to expand health insurance to the poorest Americans, $79 billion to keep state governments from having to cut key services and $43 billion to boost unemployment benefits.
Those may be worthy expenditures, but are they stimulus? Are they going to create jobs?
Remember, anytime government spends money, it spends it wastefully. If government wants to pour money into the economy, it would be a lot smarter for our venerable leaders just to write us all a big, fat check.
That would be the quickest, most efficient way to get money into the economy. No need for some government bureaucratic middleman.
But here's the thing. Will it work? That's the bottom line. We can argue all day whether this is stimulus or expansion of government, but what really matters is the answer to this question. Will this package help bring us out of the recession?
I think it probably will have a positive effect. But I wonder how much more positive of an effect it could have had if it had been weighted more toward infrastructure improvements and tax cuts instead of funding government programs.
We'll never know.
But I also believe the U.S. economy will recover from the recession regardless of what the government does. The government can make the recession a little shallower or a little shorter. But even if the government did nothing, the economy would recover.
So will this stimulus package help? Yes, I think it will, marginally. But I think there was a better way.
Seems to me this "stimulus" essentially is just a giant pile of new and existing government programs - a backdoor way of expanding and funding big government.
It's a column by U.S. Rep. John Linder, R-Georgia, written for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
He starts out with this:
You have all heard the proverb: "Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he can eat for the rest of his life."
The $825 billion stimulus package we voted on Wednesday night is full of fish to hand out, but no fishing rods. I voted no.
And ends with this:
During the Ways and Means Committee mark-up on the bill, Rep. David Camp (R-MI), the lead Republican on the committee, asked the staff director of the Joint Committee for Taxation if there was any evidence before us that would prove that this package would produce even one new job.
He responded, "No."
I would encourage everyone to read what he has to say in between.
And one more thought.
While I agree with Linder and his GOP buddies with regard to this stimulus bill, I have a question for them.
Where were they when W was running up record deficits with huge new government programs?
