Corruption, political favoritism and lack of accountability have always been the worries about the Porkulus bill and Hope ‘n Change’s inflated budgets. ‘Spreading the wealth’ creates its own incentives, not many of them good. And sure enough, we’re catching the first whiffs of a very bad smell. Buried in an AP article about the haphazard distribution of Porkulus money is this gem:
Federal auditors acknowledge they can’t yet track the transportation money that is leaving Washington and there is no single list of the thousands of projects planned in each state. For its analysis, the AP used lists of projects approved through March by the Transportation Department and collected lists of stimulus projects that have been announced in 49 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Federal officials have approved 2,800 projects. The remaining projects on the AP list represent the states’ official plans for the money. Only Virginia, which has not announced its plan, is not included.
And as the article notes, the distribution is quite uneven, with states and counties with the highest unemployment receiving little, if any, of the stimulus money.
Counties suffering the most from job losses stand to receive the least help from President Barack Obama’s plan to spend billions of stimulus dollars on roads and bridges, an Associated Press analysis has found.
Although the intent of the money is to put people back to work, AP’s review of more than 5,500 planned transportation projects nationwide reveals that states are planning to spend the stimulus in communities where jobless rates are already lower.
One result among many: Elk County, Pa., isn’t receiving any road money despite its 13.8 percent unemployment rate. Yet the military and college community of Riley County, Kan., with its 3.4 percent unemployment, will benefit from about $56 million to build a highway, improve an intersection and restore a historic farmhouse.
Altogether, the government is set to spend 50 percent more per person in areas with the lowest unemployment than it will in communities with the highest.
What do you get when you combine massive outlays with poor tracking and loose administration? I positively faint to say it, but it’s a word that begins with ‘C’. And programs like the New Deal, for instance, were powered at least in part by corruption and favoritism.
In his brilliantly analytical book New Deal or Raw Deal?, Burton Folsom discusses the side-effects of New Deal money, one of which was patronage. “If we probe deeply into Roosevelt’s popularity,” Folsom writes, “we almost always discover the presence of patronage — the creating and the manipulating of federal jobs to strengthen his political support.”
Relying on a state-by-state analysis of spending by economic historian Gavin Wright, Folsom observes that safe Democrat states – especially southern ones – received far fewer WPA dollars than richer election battleground states in the north and west. This politicization of spending resulted in WPA jobs going to states that needed them the least.
I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I observe that corruption and lack of accountability may well be the chief legacy of Porkulus and all the other spending currently in the pipeline.
Michelle Malkin is also talking up the story.
