The Bankrupt Party Of Porkulus
By Michelle Malkin
July 10, 2009
Let there be no doubt: Democrats are the party with two ideas:
borrow and spend. The only vigorous internal debate on the left
revolves around two questions: How much and how much more? Even as
the first trillion-dollar stimulus craters, the debt-o-crats are
floating yet another grand act of generational theft to create the
illusion of jumpstarting the economy.
Call it Spawn of Spendulus. Return of the Porkulus Beast. Crap
Sandwich Redux. White House economic adviser Laura D'Andrea Tyson
told an international economic conference: "We should be planning on
a contingency basis for a second round of stimulus." Team Obama
flack Robert Gibbs says the president isn't "ruling anything out,
but at the same time he's not ruling anything in." Despite the
inconvenient fact that less than 10 percent of the initial stimulus
has been spent (or misspent), congressional Democrats remain "open"
to the idea of digging a deeper fiscal hole for your children and
grandchildren.
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 nonprofit 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."
ABC News reported this week that the failed stimulus tracking
website run by the White House, Recovery.gov, will get an additional
$18 million taxpayer-funded injection to support a "redesign." The
Washington Examiner's David Freddoso points out that the contract
was awarded to a Maryland firm whose donors have contributed $19,000
to Maryland's House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
The Washington Times reported this week that "as much as $16.1
million from the stimulus program is going to save the San Francisco
Bay area habitat of, among other things, the endangered salt marsh
harvest mouse" in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's backyard.
And despite all the initial focus on basic infrastructure needs,
Land Line magazine reported this week that "even with federal
stimulus spending that put shovels in the ground on new
infrastructure projects, analysts predict an overall decline of 4.3
percent on infrastructure in 2009."
The same underhanded, transparency-defying, earmark-stuffing
process that marked the porkulus beast is dominating every other
pricey piece of legislation hurtling through the Democrat-led
Congress. The Waxman-Markey "cap and trade" bill that passed the
House two weeks ago contained bribes galore -- including a $50
million hurricane research center for Florida Democrat Alan Grayson
and a $3.5 billion economic development "sweetener" package for Ohio
Democrat Marcy Kaptur. The current health care takeover proposals
feature a crucial payoff to Big Labor -- a golden exemption from any
tax on union members' generous health care benefits.
The friends and patrons of Obama may be making out like bandits.
But for everyone else, the Democrats' ideological bankruptcy comes
at a nauseatingly steep price.
|