Stimulus Fail


Today the good Ed Morrisey fell into the trap of equating the stimulus to only the highly visible infrastructure projects, "Well, building bridges and roads hasn’t exactly started a boom economy more than 16 months after passing Porkulus."


That's true, but we should remember that roads and bridges was $27.5 billion, that is 3.5% of the $787 billion dollars.  The whole transportation and infrastructure package was "$64.1 billion of infrastructure investment to enhance the safety, security, and efficiency of our highway, transit, rail, aviation, environmental, flood control, inland waterways, public buildings, and maritime transportation infrastructure."


Last week in Washington, James Oberstar, (D-Minn), Chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee spoke at the National Fraud Conference on on Transportation Infrastructure Programs  During his speech, he gave what I thought was a powerful statistic on the Stimulus,


"Transportation and Infrastructure was 8% of the funding, but accounted for 50% of the jobs."


Wait a second!  If that's true, why didn't we just let Transportation spend 16% of the money? Then we could have gotten 100% of the jobs, and saved $661 billion.


When the money went to roads and bridges, we could see that. What we should be asking is where did the rest of the money go?