Corruption: In an election year in which Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress are threatened, no price is too high for extra votes — even if it means taking from the poor.

What do you do when a trillion-plus dollars in "job-creating" stimulus fails to create jobs? Pass more stimulus — telling the people not to worry, that this time it's only $26 billion.

But what President Obama signed into law this week was not just good taxpayer money thrown after bad.

This was not, as the president claimed, about "saving the jobs of teachers and other essential professionals." It was about using taxpayer money to pay off teacher union bosses, reward them for past political favors and get the vote out for Democrats this year.

Some 160,000 public teachers are to find their jobs "saved" this fall. As House Budget Committee ranking Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has described it, "we went from bailing out big companies to now bailing out big governments."

Ryan points out that the goal of this added stimulus is "not incentives for small business and private-sector job creation. The goal here is very clear: public-sector job creation," he told Fox News' Neil Cavuto.

As Ryan put it, "taxpayers from frugal states are basically bailing out taxpayers from profligate states."

Economic woes were forcing state and local governments to clean up their act and tighten their belt.

But as our scaremongering president describes it, such responsible fiscal management "will deprive countless cities and towns of the law enforcement officials and first responders who risk their lives to keep us out of harm's way. ... It will take us backwards at a time when we need to keep this country moving forward."

And so, wasteful state and local governments get a federal bailout.

It works perfectly with the political strategy of the public teachers unions. The National Education Association public school teachers union spent $32 million on political activities in 2007 alone.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, from 1990 to 2004, 94% of political contributions made by the NEA's political action committees and individual officers went to Democrats.

Let's look at one state, Oregon, where the political influence of the teachers unions is thought to be stronger than anywhere. As Betsy Hammond of the Oregonian pointed out last month, "the nation's two large teachers unions and their state affiliates contributed $357 per teacher to elections in Oregon," nearly all of which was used to fight sensible ballot measures such as one requiring that teacher pay raises be based on their performance.

In Newark, N.J., the public teachers union boasts of "The Most Comprehensive Public Employee Contract in New Jersey."

Of its thousands of tenured teachers, fewer than a half-dozen were fired from 2001 to 2005. Could that be why less than 31% of Newark public school seniors graduated with a normal high school diploma over the same period?

This $26 billion bailout is about political power that buttresses big government, not educating kids or maintaining police and fire department services. Because of that dishonest facade, the president and Congress have actually been able to raid the food-stamp program to fund their Democratic Party vote-buying scheme.

Some $12 billion will be swiped from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which assists 41 million poor Americans.

Can you imagine the uproar if Republicans raided food stamps for, say, tax cuts? Yet cutting taxes would be a real "jobs bill." And it would be worth taking away some peoples' food stamps if it resulted in them getting a good job in a troubled economy.

Why not let food-stamp recipients trade in their federal Electronic Benefits Transfer card for a public employees union membership card? Or, better, why not build an economy that creates real jobs?