Congress making rotten 'sausage' with economic stimulus package
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
February 5, 2009
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, told a C-SPAN audience yesterday that drafting the Senate’s version of an economic stimulus bill is “like making sausage.” Taxpayers might want to add the word “rotten” to Boxer’s formulation.
Despite the fact several now former colleagues are in jail for earmark-related crimes and strong public dissatisfaction with earmarks and the congressional culture of corruption such spending encourages, both chambers of Congress are larding up legislation faster than ever.
The House-passed $825 billion economic stimulus bill was chock full of pork barrel spending, so much so that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that only about a quarter of the projects funded would actually get money within the first year.
So much for legislation meant to, in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s words, provide a quick jolt to the recessionary economy by injecting billions of dollars for projects that would be “temporary, targeted and timely.”
Now the Senate is getting into the act by crafting it’s own version of an economic stimulus bill and it looks certain to cost even more than the House version, thanks to senators stuffing more outrageous spending projects into it:
- $1.5 billion for the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program, which is state and local authorities sometimes use these funds to pay bail for people charged with serious crimes and who are likely to flee since it’s not their money at stake.
- $1 billion to improve U.S. Census Bureau management.
- $88 million to move the U.S. Public Health Service into a new building in 2010.
- $2.1` billion to make up a deficit in the federal public housing program.
- $870 million to fund anti-flu measures.
- $400 million to combat STDs.
- $380 million to create a “rainy day fund” for the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food program.
- $200 million to buy electric cars for the Pentagon, which doesn’t want them.
- $34 million to fix up the Department of Commerce headquarters
- $75 million for a new anti-smoking program.
- $650 million for more digital TV coupons to help people make the transition to HD.
- $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.
No wonder staff members of the Joint Committee on Taxation told a Senate panel that there are no guarantees of any jobs being created outside of the public sector by the economic stimulus package.
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