Sheldon Richman
Dog Bites Man
President Barack Obama’s ban on earmarks in the $825 billion economic stimulus bill doesn’t mean interest groups, lobbyists and lawmakers won’t be able to funnel money to pet projects.They’re just working around it — and perhaps inadvertently making the process more secretive….The result, as The Associated Press learned in interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers, lobbyists and state and local officials, is a shadowy lobbying effort that may make it difficult to discern how hundreds of billions in federal money will be parceled out.”‘No earmarks’ isn’t a game-ender,” said Peter Buffa, former mayor of Costa Mesa, Calif. “It just means there’s a different way of going about making sure the funding is there.”
–Associated Press, Jan. 26
Comment by Carl Clegg on 27 January 2009:
The $825 billion spending spree will finance the establishment of myriad bureaucracies and entitlement programs — most notably health care spending — which we will be saddled with for generations to come. Here in New Jersey for every new private job that has been created in the past 7 years, Trenton has created 15 state jobs — according to yesterday’s WSJ. At local, state, and federal-level, we will be racking up so much debt and so many new entitlements that down the road we will either have significant tax burdens to bear or higher inflation.