HoodaThunk?

I’m all for spending public funds on public projects when those project actually produce a measurable benefit. The stimulus package getting the bum’s rush out the Congressional door so it can hit America’s street isn’t measuing up to that promise with far, far more funding going to things that don’t really generate jobs and don’t produce a public interest than do. The Wall Street Journal has more revealing information:

The stimulus bill currently steaming through Congress looks like a legislative freight train, but given last week’s analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, it is more accurate to think of it as a time machine. That may be the only way to explain how spending on public works in 2011 and beyond will help the economy today.

According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, a mere $26 billion of the House stimulus bill’s $355 billion in new spending would actually be spent in the current fiscal year, and just $110 billion would be spent by the end of 2010. This is highly embarrassing given that Congress’s justification for passing this bill so urgently is to help the economy right now, if not sooner.

And the red Congressional faces must be very red indeed, because CBO’s analysis has since vanished into thin air after having been posted early last week on the Appropriations Committee Web site. Officially, the committee says this is because the estimates have been superseded as the legislation has moved through committee. No doubt.

Indeed. I think if a government agency had released a report detailing figures about proposed government spending, say, 6 months ago and then – poof! – made them disappear there’d be enough wailing and gnashing of teeth from certain sectors of our public debate you’d have thought it was San Francisco 1906 all over again.

The WSJ editorial ends with an admonition to the Democrats now in control that Americans may be largely supportive of them at the moment, but if they toss hundreds of billions of their tax dollars at this problem and, come summer, the economy is still in recession they’re going to be asking what they bought with all that money. Indeed, many of us are asking that already given that $350 billion went into banks that we were assured would open up the credit markets and things don’t look much better today than before. We were asked to put billions into auto companies that lost billions of their own without any assurances that they’d change the business practices that they used to lose the money in the first place. And now… well, it’s already clear that much more than half of the nearly $1 trillion stimulus won’t be buying us anything we’ll ever notice.

Read the article, it’s illuminating.