BuckeyeBlog

The commissioners in Warren County are saying “no, thanks” to some of the federal stimulus money because it’s “bad, filthy money”:

Warren County commissioners say they don’t want more than $2 million in federal stimulus funds offered to the county to pay for transit and “green” projects. 

The county refused to take $373,000 set aside by the Ohio Department of Transportation to purchase three shuttle vans for the county transit program and a computer-based program to schedule rides requested by residents.

“This is bad, filthy money, folks,” Commissioner Mike Kilburn said March 17, when the commissioners voted unanimously not to accept transit dollars. “This is money we don’t have.”

These commissioners are exactly right. They want to see if the money can be used to help defray the huge national debt being run up to pay for this “stimulus.”

While some may attack them for not accepting this “free” money, these commissioners understand the problems with higher government spending. If more politicians were like them we’d have far less wasteful and irresponsible spending than we do today.

Intertwining humor and his opposition to the stimulus bill, Minority leader of the House John Boehner brought out the immense stimulus bill and pointed out that not one member of the House had read it. “I don’t know you could read 1,100 pages between midnight and now.” He then dropped the massive heap of government excess on the floor, creating a thud so loud even the White House could hear it.

If the stimulus money being dumped into the states was being used for one-time use infrastructure projects or to pay off the massive state debts that some states (like Ohio) seem to be racking up, that’d make a little more sense than the current idea. As of right now, it looks like Governors are going to invest the money into programs they won’t be able to sustain when the money dries up. Governor Strickland was on Face The Nation and outlined part of his “plan” for the stimulus money:

“We will use those resources to make sure that college tuition doesn’t explode, that we are going to invest in elementary and secondary education, to provide quality child care for our kids,” said Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, who said his state will receive about $8.2 billion. “We need these resources. And I’m very happy that the congress and the president is providing this resource to our states.”

How exactly do you invest in education with money that’s a one-time shot? If you expand programs, or make schools dependent upon this money for resources or salaries, aren’t you setting the state up for a future budget shortfall? What happens next year Governor?

As of right now, it looks like the next big spending bill to come out of Congress won’t see the light of day until right before it’s passed, just like the trillion dollar stimulus bill. House Republican Leader John Boehner has put out a statement that I find myself agreeing with when it comes to the upcoming bill’s transparency. We should push to see the omnibus:

“If Democratic leaders plan to schedule a vote on the half-trillion dollar omnibus spending bill next week, they should post the legislation online immediately so the American people have adequate time to read the measure and understand what is in it. My colleagues in the Republican leadership and I made this request two weeks ago, and to date, our request has gone unanswered. Time is running short, and American taxpayers deserve to know how their hard-earned tax dollars will be used under this legislation.

“The fact that the Democratic Majority is planning to bring this massive spending bill to the House floor just days after Congress approved the trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ spending plan is added proof that ‘borrow and spend’ has become Washington’s go-to strategy for funding more programs and projects that taxpayers do not need and cannot afford.”

Republican Senator Judd Gregg has been a notable critic of the politicization of the United States census in the past, and more recently he has disagreed with some of the key tenets of the stimulus bill. Fearing that the Obama administration (of which he was about to become a part) was about to make the government less accountable, especially in regards to the census, Senator Gregg withdrew his name as Commerce Secretary nominee. Via FOX News:

Republican Sen. Judd Gregg withdrew his nomination to become President Obama’s commerce secretary on Thursday, citing “irresolvable conflicts” over issues like the economic stimulus package and the Census.

In doing so, the New Hampshire senator became the first Cabinet-level nominee to withdraw his name in protest.

Senator Gregg’s decision is not only the right one in regards to the current stimulus debate, but it’s the right one in preserving the principle of accountable government.

We’re not quite sure how the federal stimulus plan will look when it leaves committee and gets a final vote in the House and Senate, but we do have an idea of what it looks like now. The Wall Street Journal was absolutely shocked to find out just how little job creation mechanism the bill had:

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.

That seems fiscally responsible, right? Wrong.

If only the American people received a full list of the spending projects slated to be in the final version of the stimulus bill, it’d make their skin crawl. Rasmussen has done some polling and what the American people want and what they’re going to get are two completely different things:

With the Senate poised to vote Tuesday on an $827-billion version of the economic recovery plan, 62% of U.S. voters want the plan to include more tax cuts and less government spending.

Just 14% would like to move in the opposite direction with more government spending and fewer tax cuts, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Twenty percent (20%) would be happy to pass it pretty much as is, and five percent (5%) are not sure.

The stimulus debate is still raging in the Senate, and most of the conflict comes from Senators arguing about which projects are a federal responsibility. From a Constitutional standpoint, the list of projects included in the bill that should be a federal priority is very small. I personally agree with one Ohio Senator in a three-pronged test for stimulus inclusion:

Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), meanwhile, said that each provision in the stimulus should be examined along three lines: is it a federal responsibility, is it shovel-ready, and is it proper.

“What we’re trying to do is look at some metrics, and the metrics are: is this a federal responsibility, is it something that’s shovel-ready, are there items there that properly should have competition in the appropriations process,” Voinovich explained.

If the entire Senate judged each and every item in the bill with these metrics, we’d be looking at something that doesn’t even resemble the current stimulus package.

As almost a direct follow-up to my previous post about transparency, news came out today that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has no plans to make Chicago’s stimulus wish list public. His rationale? He thinks that transparency would open the door for the newspapers and the media to rip the city’s project plans apart. Mayor Daley doesn’t seem to understand that a media watchdog effort would be a huge positive step towards making government accountable for huge spending increases. To give Central Ohio cities a little credit, their wish lists are very public, but that doesn’t mean they’re in any way prudent:

Central Ohio would be jumping with more than $1 billion in federal spending on infrastructure, energy and transit projects if area leaders have their dreams fulfilled by an economic stimulus package coming out of Washington.

That’s the combined price tag of the funding wish lists for the city of Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio State University, Central Ohio Transit Authority and communities within the 12-county area served by the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission. The list includes a range of projects, from $200 million for a light rail line in Columbus to $50,000 to build sidewalks in rural Plain City.

Central Ohio could use some infrastructure improvements for sure, as could a lot of regions of the United States, but big government solutions like more revenue-draining public transit systems and useless sidewalks are hardly efficient “stimulus” projects. This is why we need transparency, so that we can weed out the bad ideas.

According to the Washington Post:

Senate Democratic leaders conceded yesterday that they do not have the votes to pass the stimulus bill as currently written and said that to gain bipartisan support, they will seek to cut provisions that would not provide an immediate boost to the economy.

Since that’s the criteria, does that mean the whole thing will be stopped? Unfortunately, no. Instead, it means that the price tag may be dropped by $200 million or so. That’s good as far as it goes, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see the final version end up close to the current $900 billion price.

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Dick Armey hands out some economic knowledge that should be kept in mind during the stimulus debate:

The problem with government attempts to manipulate the economy through fiscal policy — spending that takes resources away from those who are productive and redistributes it to politically favored interests — is that it is audacious. It assumes that government knows better how to spend and invest than individuals acting in their families’ best interest.

“The real question,” according to [Friedrich] Hayek, “is not whether man is, or ought to be, guided by selfish motives but whether we can allow him to be guided in his actions by those immediate consequences which we can know and care for or whether he ought to be made to do what seems appropriate to somebody else who is supposed to possess a fuller comprehension of the significance of these actions to society as a whole.”

In reality, no one spends someone else’s money better than they spend their own. The charade of the current stimulus package, chockablock with earmarks to favored pet constituencies and virtually devoid of national policy considerations, is the logical consequence of Keynesianism in action. It is about politics and power, not sound economics, and I believe that the American people will reject it.