From The Pilot
By Kevin Smith - Sunday, August 8, 2010
Tuesday, Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma held a press conference to introduce their list of the 100 biggest boondoggles of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
The report, titled "Summertime Blues," is intended to expose the federal stimulus as just another example of irresponsible government spending. Republi-cans refer to the ARRA as "the $800 billion stimulus that didn't stimulate anything." The word "bailout" spits out like an obscenity from people who regard any interaction between government and business as unsavory.
We are so conditioned to be wary of the perils of anti-recessionary government spending that it's easy to miss the benefits that are all around us - a local auto dealership that can stay open and keep its brand, a teacher who was laid off and then rehired before missing a day of school or a homeowner who is able to avoid foreclosure.
The fact is that the Recovery Act has had a significant effect on jobs in North Carolina. According to Edwin McLenaghan, a policy analyst at the N.C. Budget and Tax Center, 90,000 jobs were saved or created in North Carolina because of the ARRA.
"The more than $2 billion in aid from the federal government was critical for keeping our teachers, police officers, firefighters and health-care workers on the job in our communities," McLenaghan said. "It has also kept the state from cutting millions of dollars in contracts with hard-hit private companies that may otherwise have laid off thousands of additional workers."
Richard Burr denounced the stimulus on Fox News, declaring, "This isn't a stimulus package, it's a spending package." More recently, however, our senior senator was able to overcome his disdain for the spending package long enough to deliver $2,008,515 of ARRA funds to the fire department in Bethlehem, N.C., for a new fire station.
Coburn was more gracious in allowing, "There is no question that this stimulus bill has had a positive effect on the economy to a certain degree."
In fact, a study published by former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder estimates that "there would be about 8.5 million fewer jobs, on top of the more than 8 million already lost; and the economy would be experiencing deflation, instead of low inflation."
That's a considerable "degree."
Coburn continued, "What our criticism is, it could have had far greater effect." Coburn claims that his study exposes some 300 programs amounting to about $15 billion of wasteful spending money. If all their claims were valid, it would amount to slightly less than two tenths of a percent of the stimulus.
All their claims are not valid.
Already No. 2 on their list, a UNC Charlotte project to develop a choreography software program had to be removed when CNN discovered the report had its facts wrong. Similarly a Wake Forest University "study of cocaine-addicted monkeys" sounds outlandish - way more so than studying how cocaine and alcohol affect a key transmitter in the brain, called glutamate, in order to determine how those substances change a brain.
Studying the effect of yoga on menopausal women seems frivolous - unless you consider that for millions of women, including three million breast cancer survivors, traditional hormone therapy is not an option for treating hot flashes. The boondoggles attributed to our state dissappear in the light of day.
It is a useful thing to expose and eliminate waste, but there's less to the Summertime Blues report than meets the eye. Much of the report will be discredited, but the report has already achieved the headlines it intended.
If McCain and Coburn supported the ARRA, they'd be crowing about the incredible efficiency of a federal program with less than .2 percent waste. Instead, their report fosters the impression that the stimulus glass is three quarters empty - even when it's 99.8 percent full.
Kevin Smith lives in Aberdeen. Contact him at kevinasmith@gmx.com.
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