Not Bacon. Pork.

When you have some downtime today, I have an assignment for you.

Jeff Rosenberg at the Daily Liberal looks at the bill apportioning Minnesota’s share of the Porkulus spending, and asks “Where’s the pork?”

It’s interesting to see Minnesota Republicans not just adopting the national Republicans’ strategy, but also their talking points.

[Ahem.  Grrrrrrr.  Ed]

And of course, they do it even when it doesn’t make sense. Session Daily reports:

Rep. Keith Downey (R-Edina) was one of several Republicans who criticized the bill as being hastily constructed and potentially filled with “pork.”

Pork? Really? You might disagree with those spending priorities, but are they really pork? Or is this just another example of the word “pork” being used as a meaningless political buzzword?

I have an idea. I’ll post the entire text of HF 680 below; it’s actually not too long. Righties, please tell me where you think the “pork” is.

Jeff asked for help.  We should lend it to him.

Jeff helpfully posts the entire bill.  Why not skip on over there and show Jeff – not a bad guy, by the way – where the pork is?

I’ll see you over there.  Over lunch, anyway.  Time to run to work.

26 thoughts on “Not Bacon. Pork.

  1. “”[Ahem. Grrrrrrr. Ed]””

    Translated: How DARE you accuse me of doing exactly what I am doing!

    Example: –> http://tinyurl.com/aw5o23

    RUSH: — because this a pork bill. You could call this the “porkulus.”

    CANTOR: Right. (laughing) Let me tell you something. It is porkulus. That’s a great description.

    Glad to see you are still in step!

  2. So what’s this big “gotcha” you think you have?

    That conservatives agree that socializing the economy and spending like crack whores with stolen gold cards is a bad thing?

    Quick! Run to MPR! It’s a news…flash, as it were!

  3. How dare you agree with Eric Cantor and Rush, Mitch? What the hell are you thinking?

    As always, we appreciate your instruction, Flash. I’m sure I’ll get my mind right eventually. (And we love those parentheticals.)

  4. HELP! Too many righties on my blog today!

    I mean, err, thanks for the link, Mitch!

    I think you’re missing my point on talking points. I don’t have a problem with talking points — but I do have a problem when they don’t apply. My complaint isn’t “you’re just using talking points.” My complaint is “you’re borrowing irrelevant talking points because you don’t have a real argument.”

  5. Sorry to say it, but I think “having a real argument” is not necessarily a strong suit among liberals. They seem to be more into dismissal, denial, deflection and disinformation, from everything I have seen. How long do you suppose before the wheels come off the “conversation” over there?

  6. Here’s how I see it working over at Jeffy’s

    1. Jeff asks for an example of pork.

    2. J. Ewing points out the example that doing any kind of weather proofing or window replacement without doing a cost benefit analysis (know how long or even if the cost is every recouped) is an example of wasteful spending.

    3. Jeff sticks fingers in ear and yells “I can’t hear you la la la la la “.

    What’s the point

  7. Exhibit A: AssClown discloses he will be laying over at the MSP airport en route to an undisclosed final destination.

    Exhibit B: This blog is left without AssClown’s buffoonery for several days.

    Exhibit C: From today’s San Francisco Chronicle

    “Frank Salvador Solorza, 45, allegedly orchestrated the scheme over the phone and in letters. He was arrested Feb. 10 after he arrived at a home in San Mateo County on a bicycle – while dressed in a clown suit…”

    The only questions left to ask are “Was he scattering a trail of skittles behind him?” and “What did he say when Chris Hansen came out?”

  8. Jeff,

    The “talking points” bit was an aside. The real point; Dems seem to have the idea that any spending helps the economy. It’s just not true.

  9. If any spending helps the economy (see RickDFL’s “Paying people to dig ditches has immediate stimulative effect but does not add much to the economy long term.” comment here: http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=4219#comment-45896)
    Why does the congressonal majority want to filter it through their patronage system? Why not just write a check? To me, preferably. Write me a check for a million bucks and I will retire from job (reducing unemployment) and buy a house or two that is facing foreclosure. Everbody wins, but especially me.
    Seriously, I think the supporters of the stimulus plan are trying to have it both ways. They a) insist that all the spending is geared towards economic stimulus and b) when they called on some pretty clear examples of pork insist that any spending acts as a stimulus.

  10. Flying pig moment:

    “What is the world coming to? Pat Dollard reports the Russian leader warned the US against adopting socialism because it doesn’t work: Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin has said the US should take a lesson from the pages of Russian history and not exercise ”excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence”.

  11. Maybe all we have here is liberals wanting to define their own terms– nothing new. They say stimulus is not pork because they define it that way. Until they’re willing to say that pork is wasteful spending and the Porkulus bill is all wasteful spending, they’ll never understand (assuming they are even capable of such) your argument, because to admit the definition is to cede the argument. They simply deny the charge based on their own definition of the terms.

    The real problem I have with the stimulus is a three-fold failure of logic. The first is that government spending can “stimulate” the economy. It never has before, and I would think it would depend very greatly what it was spent ON, as to whether the effect was neutral or negative. The corollary logical failure is that government cannot put one dime “into” the economy that it does not first remove from the economy, in some fashion. All that changes is who decides where to spend the dime.

    The second failing is the common reference to this as a “spending” bill, and both Republicans and Democrats use that term. It isn’t. A spending bill spends REAL MONEY on something. This is just writing bad checks to yourself, and thinking you’re getting rich doing it.

    The last one is in characterizing the tax cuts in the bill, to the degree they are there and are truly cuts (and not just handouts), as “spending.” It’s absolute murder of the rules of logic to say that letting people keep more of their own money through a tax cut must be “paid for” by taking more of their money away from them in added taxes. Yet that is the claim. Somehow we need to make it clear that tax cuts must be paid for by /spending/ cuts, not tax increases.

    This bill wastes $3000 for every man, woman and child in the country, out of money that the government does not have. The claim is that this will be well worth it when the “stimulus” jump-starts the economy. OK, I’m willing to wait 30 days, but if things aren’t better by then I want my money back. Oh, that’s right. It’s not real money.

  12. I agree with J. Ewing but would just add a couple of points.

    An actual economic recovery is going to happen when the private sector recovers and businesses expand and start (re)hiring people. Having the government borrow another $800 billion (more like $1.2 Trillion when you add in the interest costs) crowds out the capital available for private investment. The point of TARP was to get the credit flowing but the effects of the “stimulus” bill seems to be to soak it back up.

    Businesspeople realize that if the government is going on a spending binge that there is going to be a reckoning in the form of higher taxes and/or interest rates and the market seems to be responding accordingly.

    I’m not a believer in the Keynesian “prime the pump” methodology because it takes about eighteen months or longer for the effects to be felt. Which means that it’s likely by the time the new spending works its way through the system, it will have an inflationary effect – right about the time when the fed responds with interest rate increases and/or Congress responds with a tax hike.

    Finally the baby boom generation gets closer each day to when they’re eligible to begin drawing on Medicare and Social Security which barring some serious structural changes, that this president and Congress have shown no interest in even discussing, will bankrupt the federal government as entitlement spending along with interest payments pretty much crowds out everything else and/or puts pressure for yet another tax increase.

    On other note, part of the reason why I agree that this is really a “Porkulus” or “Porkapalooza” bill is because Obama did run on saying that he would “eliminate government programs that didn’t work” and already he’s pushing the “any spending is stimulus” line. It’s no secret that the spending in the bill is essentially a wish list of pet projects (many of which Obama campaigned on) that’s being rammed through because there is a “crisis” that apparently is too “urgent” for the governing party to keep their pledge to make it available to the public or even to allow members to read before voting on. It’s not a serious solution, it’s crass political calculation at its worst.

  13. Terry;
    “If any spending helps the economy. . . Why not just write a check?”
    Because different kinds of spending has a greater or lesser immediate stimulative effect and different kinds of spending have a greater or lesser longer term benefit to the economy. Giving you a million dollars check does very little to stimulate the economy and produces very little long-term benefit. Spending a million to fix up a school employs workers and suppliers and at the end you have a nice fixed up school.

  14. RickDFL, that is the dumbest thing you’ve ever written.
    Somebody else’s kids get a marginally better school to drop out from be taught inadequately at. Versus me retiring wealthy.
    Let me clue you in on something, RickDFL. It is not your money. It is money wrung from the labor of people wh work for a living. Please quit using it to buy votes.

  15. Exactly right, Rick. But the added value of a gilded-lily school is exactly zero, and won’t happen for years. The jobs “created” will already be in existence, just re-purposed from elsewhere, and this new “job” will disappear in a few years. Net stimulation of the economy= zero or less, probably much less. Government spending, especially on “pork,” is the worst possible kind of spending for long-term (and short term) benefit to the economy. Going into massive debt for it borders on criminality, or criminal stupidity, take your pick.

  16. If taking on massive debt to build public works projects would stimulate the economy Japan wouldn’t still be in recession.
    The Soviet Union would have not gone broke.
    It worked in WW2 because we pulled millions of young men out of the work force and stuffed them into uniforms, killing 300K of them in the process. Then we built lots of heavy industrial equipment and destroyed it. Then, when the entire world outside of the US was a smoking ruin we exported stuff.
    RickDFL’s plan is to emulate this by “fixing up schools”.

  17. Sort of like Milwaukee, where the Porkulus will spend some $50 million building new public schools while 15 schools already sit empty. With apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary: “Where have all the children gone? Gone to vouchers, every one. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?” Now the students are learning. Democrats still haven’t.

  18. J.Ewing
    “Sort of like Milwaukee, where the Porkulus will spend some $50 million building new public schools while 15 schools already sit empty.”

    Do you have any evidence for this? Are the new school being built in the same part of town as the old schools? What condition are the empty schools in?

  19. Ah, Rick…

    Do you have any evidence this is NOT in the bill? Since no one in Congress has read the whole thing– nor even the opportunity to do so– the whole thing is a pig in a poke, or pork in a poke if you prefer. After you read it through and don’t find this particular little riblet, I’ll stand corrected. But I believe it was in the original House version, and it’s certainly typical of many other provisions of the bill.

    The rest of your questions are simply nit-picking and misses the central point, that the federal government should not be building local “infrastructure” at all, certainly when it is unneeded or even unwanted. Nor should the federal government be piling massive debt on the children that might attend these schools– it isn’t helping them in any real way to spend their lifetime earnings giving them a palace in which to receive an inferior education. Above all, it’s absolute folly to proclaim this a “stimulus” for the economy, it’s just more of spending money that we don’t have on things we don’t need, which is exactly how we got into this mess.

  20. “Do you have any evidence this is NOT in the bill?”

    Glad to see SITD maintaining the strict standards of evidence which I fell in love with.

    “when it is unneeded or even unwanted”
    a. you have no evidence that there are 15 empty high schools in Milwaukee and b. even if there are, there still may be need to rehab or re-model existing high schools.

    Here we are 20 plus pots into this and no one has pointed to a specific project they think is wasteful. Just blanket ‘it is all wasteful’ proclamations.

  21. Not wastefull, RickDFL. Pork.
    You’ve already stated that any government spending has a stimulative effect, meaning that pork is stimulus & stimulus and stimulus is pork.
    Stealing money from people who work for a living and their kids.Typical DFl’r.

  22. Rick, if you’re concerned about strict standards of evidence, let’s see some. Ask your Congresscritter to tell you exactly what’s in the bill for Milwaukee, who asked for it, and why. (Of course, they would have to read it first.) There is a common perception– perhaps a misperception that you could correct with actual fact– that this bill is nothing but a liberal “wish list” of phony-baloney, plastic banana, feel-good, sex, drugs and rock and roll political payoffs, with no thought to the effect it will have on the economy. Every detail that has emerged to date has strengthened this perception.

    Tell you what: fair as I am, I’ll make it easy. Find me three specific (spending) items in the bill that are NOT some special interest boondoggle and that WILL give an immediate and effective boost to the economy.

  23. J. Ewing:

    As far as I can tell there are exactly $0 in the stimulus bill that must be spent on new school construction in Milwaukee. There are $s dedicated to school modernization that could be used for a variety of projects, such as improving the energy efficiency of schools. They money will employ workers quickly, save local taxpayers energy costs down the road, and help save the environment.

    Two other specific items include:

    1. Food stamps benefits will be increased to cover the increased cost of food. This eases the burden of the recession on struggling families and keeps $s flowing in the economy. Jobs for farmers, grocers, and deliverymen.

    2. The new law provides a 65% subsidy toward the cost of COBRA premiums for up to 9 months for people laid off between 9/1/08 and 12/31/09. This keeps public off public HC and eases burdens on state budgets.

  24. Just more welfare, bureaucracy, and re-distribution of wealth.

    The Liberal Fascists like rick/flush/et al must be happy; they’ve been praying for this.

  25. Rick, apparently the new schools were dropped in conference, except for a $15 million dollar new high school in the suburbs. The modernization money is just a boondoggle, an attempt to stop the non-existent “global warming” and to create jobs that already exist, but diverting them to digging holes and filling them up (with insulation). Besides, it’s not Congress’ job to “save money down the road” for Milwaukee taxpayers, unless they want to give everybody a tax cut. If the folks in Milwaukee think they can save money by insulating their schools, let them do it.

    How nonsensical do you want to be? Giving people taxpayer money for COBRA health care “keeps them off public HC”??? Where do you think federal money comes from? In the case of this porkulus, there isn’t any real money at all! Tom Cole, the Congressman from Oklahoma, had it about right when he said, “Never before have so few spent so much so quickly for such little effect.”

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