Stimulating Democratic Voters

Here’s a thought for you eternal optimists. Maybe the Democratic stimulus bill is so egregious that it will give stimulus a bad name.

Any Republican that wanted an excuse to oppose it now surely has enough ammunition. You could get all the ammo you needed just from today’s Wall Street Journal.

First, there is the top editorial. The Journal edit page folks point out that there isn’t much economic stimulus in the bill at all.

Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There’s another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.



Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and 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.

Twelve cents on the dollar of stimulus ain’t exactly going to stir the sleeping beast.

Next, there’s supply-side economist Alan Reynolds. He points out that the stimulus is mostly going to sectors of the economy that aren’t suffering too much from the recession. Like government employees.

The December unemployment rate was only 2.3% for government workers and 3.8% in education and health. Unemployment rates in manufacturing and construction, by contrast, were 8.3% and 15.2% respectively. Yet 39% of the $550 billion in the bill would go to state and local governments. Another 17.3% would go to health and education — sectors where relatively secure government jobs are also prevalent.

Well, OK. No serious person imagines that the stimulus is much more than a payoff to Democratic voters. Of course, you needn’t expect the MSM to point that out to alert voters. Move along there; nothing to see here. In fact you might even expect a loyal MSMer to worry that there wasn’t enough money for government in the stimulus.

Lastly, there is the Journal’s house liberal. Wouldn’t you know that Thomas Frank chooses this exact moment to criticize the notion of privatizing roads and bridges. He’s worried about the danger that the stimulus bill might include incentives to privatize infrastructure development. He sneers at privatization lobbyists who urge that governments lock in private investment before private investment money gets committed to other projects.

But there’s good reason to be reluctant to privatize. It doesn’t take an MBA to figure out that we didn’t build our Interstate highways in order to create opportunities for venture capitalists. The purpose was public service.

Oh really. I thought the whole idea of infrastructure development was to give jobs to union workers, fees to investment bankers and kickbacks to state and local politicians. Silly me.

It is the canard of “public service” that fuels the self-dealing monstrosities like the current stimulus bill in Congress. When can we ever hope for a time in which politicians (and particularly Democrats) stop dumping these wasteful proposals on the American people with the assistance of willing accomplices in the media like Thomas Frank? It ain’t public service, Mr. Frank. It is just politics as usual.

The idea behind bridges and highways is not “public service.” It is economic development. We want to build economic infrastructure that will help move goods and services around and save human and natural resources in doing so. It is, if you like, public service to build a road in Yellowstone National Park so people can drive around in an area of natural beauty. But for regular infrastructure, the purpose is economic. Modern political and economic theory and practice tells us that profit-seeking businessmen are much better at doing this than vote-seeking politicians.

Some day even dyed-in-the-wool liberal MSMers like Thomas Frank will admit this. But probably not before liberals bring the entire economic house down around our ears.

The truth is that almost everything the government does is a cruel waste of scarce natural and human resources. And it looks like the current victory-lap stimulus bill of President Barack Obama and Speak Nancy Pelosi and liberal commentator Thomas Frank is no exception.

But there is always Hope for Change. Maybe the more that ordinary Americans get to see of the stimulus bill the less they will continue to Hope that the Obama Administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress represent anything within a country mile of Change.