Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows. That money includes aid to repair military bases, improve public housing and help students pay for college.
Porkulus One was a massive payoff to special interests and political constituencies (and dead people!) disguised as a job generator. A General Accounting Office analysis this week revealed that stimulus dollars allocated to states and localities are not being spent on what they’re supposed to be spent on. States are making up their own criteria for spending. The most economically distressed parts of the country are getting shortchanged. School and transportation bureaucrats are using the money to preserve their own jobs instead of “stimulating” others. And assessments of the stimulative effect of the package are a joke. As House Republicans noted: “The Administration has essentially “rigged the game’ of reporting the tangible effects of its stimulus program by creating an immeasurable metric – ‘jobs created or saved’ – that no one can disprove.”
Irked by the mounting evidence of stimulus failure, Vice President Joe Biden griped at a spending event on Thursday: “This ain’t about swimming pools and frisbee parks and polar bear exhibits. This is about stuff that not only passed the test of jobs, but passed the smell test. … All the talk about how we’re gonna waste all this money, that’s a dog that ain’t barked yet. And it’s not gonna bark on my watch.” Yet last month, Sen. Tom Coburn exposed 100 smelly stimulus projects worth $5.5 billion, including $3.4 million for a wildlife “eco-passage” in Florida to take animals safely under a busy roadway; nearly $10 million to renovate an unused train station; and a $2 million “weatherization” contract awarded to a Nevada non-profit recently fired for doing the same type of work.
After failing to recognize the inevitable and inexorable political forces that turned the stimulus into the Mother of All Beltway Boondoggles, media outlets are now playing catch up:
USA Today reported this week that “counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain.”
There’s no politics at work in spending the money? The White House wants people to believe this is a statistical anomaly. It may not have been a deliberate calculation, but the disparity comes from the nature of the stimulus, and it shows just how political Porkulus was. It wasn’t a stimulus package at all – most of the money gets spent after the first year — but a collection of Democratic Party ideological wish lists and pork projects. Districts that voted Obama get twice as much money per person because Democrats controlled the pork projects and got the money into their districts. That’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s certainly revealing.
And about that factual content: The Heath piece basically says (1) counties that voted for Obama get more money than counties that voted for McCain; (2) pretty much all of this money “has followed a well-worn path … guided by formulas that have been in place for decades and leave little room for manipulation.” There is no theory presented for how the spending could have been manipulated.
The article concludes by noting that “From 2005 through 2007, the counties that later voted for Obama collected about 50% more government aid than those that supported McCain, according to spending reports from the U.S. Census Bureau.” Yikes! Either that completely destroys the premise of the article, or this pro-Obama conspiracy runs far deeper than even USA Today can imagine…
The secret to the riddle seems to be that areas that benefit from federal spending formulae tend to support the Democrats. Not as a result of short-term fluctuations in voting patterns or federal spending levels, but as a structural element of American politics.
That said, this is the sort of thing that I’m glad people are looking into. Politicians obviously are cognizant of the fact that measures may or may not direct funds to their supporters. But it would be nice to see it done in a less sloppy manner. For one thing, though the press likes to talk a lot about who’s the president and who might be president, when it comes to the details of domestic policy the authority lies almost entirely with congress. Obviously, there’s substantial overlap between the areas that voted for Obama and the areas that elected a Democratic member of congress. But you’d probably get a more enlightening result if you specifically zeroed in on the congressional issue. Or maybe even looked at particular members of congress. Is what was done unusually favorable to David Obey’s constituents relative to other plausible opportunities? What was the impact of the changes forced by centrist senators?
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July 10, 2009 at 3:03 pm
[...] designed to pay off political cronies like the unions and areas that voted for Obama (H/T: Around The Sphere) and was loaded down with some of the most ridiculous pork projects ever seen.Expectations for a [...]