That's the quote of the day, thanks to colunmist Mark Steyn of Steyn on American, via Carl Gipson of the Washington Policy Center.

The full quote: "Congress, meanwhile, is behaving disgracefully, magically transforming pork into "stimulus" by sticking another three zeroes on the end."

Here's the full post by Gipson.

February 02, 2009
Don't confuse 'stimulus' with 'wish list'
Last week Andrew Garber wrote a story for The Seattle Times on the Governor's request for projects that the state stimulus package may eventually fund. I think that the article revealed what is becoming an important debate on the national scale, and should be talked about as policymakers in Olympia start hashing out the details of a stimulus package -- what is economic stimulus?

[More:]

The story linked to an Office of Financial Management database that listed the projects by type and locale. Quite the good read. But the important point the article and OFM database shows is that most people (policymakers and the general public) are misconstruing economic stimulus with pork barrel projects.
Traditionally, pork barrel projects are the infrastructure projects that a representative lobbies for on behalf of their own district. This is where "bringing home the bacon" comes from. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with an elected representative trying to get the best deal for his or her district. But as the OFM list clearly shows, most of these projects are just that, projects. These will not stimulate the economy in the long run, and will only help those in the construction industry in the short run. Some projects may have long lasting benefits to the region but others will only serve to temporarily employ some workers while using government spending to do so and providing little public benefit.

But all of this, and more, is being categorized as 'economic stimulus.' You saw this happen on the national leve and the outrage was quite severe as the U.S. House of Representatives considered including millions of dollars of funding in the package for sexually transmitted disease prevention and new computers for government agencies that have little to do with regulating or dealing with the economy. Likewise, there is funding for student-loan programs, affordable housing assistance, $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, $75 million for anti-smoking programs, and lots more. Many of these may be good projects and worthy of taxpayer dollars (all the while borrowed) but none of them should honestly be categorized as having anything to do with growing the economy.

Oh, and the critical infrastructure that the stimulus was suppose to target? It received about $43 billion in the package (about 5%).

Columnist Mark Steyn had a good quote on the matter:

"Congress, meanwhile, is behaving disgracefully, magically transforming pork into "stimulus" by sticking another three zeroes on the end."

If infrastructure were so important, as Congress claimed, they should have started by quickly passing $50 in infrastructure spending. Instead, they chose to increase that figure by 1,600% and spread it around various industries and pet projects. Granted the Senate will tinker with the package, but it won't look much different, overall, from the House's version.

The lesson here for Washington state policymakers should be that our economic stimulus cannot turn into a pork-ridden piece of legislation that tries to make everyone happy while having little to no effect on growing the economy -- which is what economic stimulus is truly about.

Posted by Carl Gipson at 12:01 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink

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Carl Gipson | Director, Small Business, Technology and Telecommunications
Washington Policy Center
206.937.9691 (ph) | 206.915.8902 (cell)
washingtonpolicy.org | washingtonpolicyblog.org