One week into the Stimulus regime and the conservative Republican establishment is confident it has the issue. Republicans must attack spending and big government. As the party of fiscal responsibility, they first fought the “Porkulus.” Now they are gearing up to go after “more than 9,000 earmarks” in the Omnibus.
Republicans are rightly concerned with the President’s historic efforts at government expansion. But in attacking the pork-content of these proposals, they are missing their opportunity to slow Obama’s agenda and begin the slow process of conservative realignment.
The GOP failed to grasp that the real shame of the Stimulus is not that there was too much pork but too much fluff – too few big projects that capture the imagination and address suburban anxieties and too many permanent government jobs and expanded government programs.
American voters want roads and bridges and airports and transit and electrical grids and schools and cops. In short, they want pork. But as the Stimulus shows, because of the shameless sums of money Democrats have committed to existing government programs and their small but vocal constituencies – not to mention to untouchable entitlements – they no longer have the financial resources to commit big money to the big projects citizens demand. If establishment Republicans could overcome their aversion to funding the large infrastructure projects suburban Americans need, they have the potential to slow now, and restrain in the future, much larger government programs and entitlements that lack broad national constituencies.
By supporting government projects that middle class and working class voters crave, Republicans will gain the credibility to reject government programs that no one needs.
After the last election, one might question the political wisdom of championing an agenda of small government attacks on pork. As Senator McCain incessantly reminded Americans, he would ‘veto any pork barrel legislation and make its authors famous.’
We all know how that turned out.
But in spite of some murmurings to the contrary, this is the ground where Republicans have decided to fight. The Stimulus debate shows the limits and ultimate shortsightedness of this approach.
There were many sound reasons for Republican opposition to the Stimulus.
It is a how-to manual for waste and corruption. It will actually manage to harm the economy in the long-term, crowding out private investment and reducing GDP over 10 years. And for good measure, after subtracting AMT relief and $200 billion that will not be spent until at least 2011, it is not even a short-term jolt to the economy.
Yet attacking the Stimulus for its pork content misses the mark. In fact, given that Democrats sold this as a bill to address critical infrastructure shortcomings, it is shocking how little pork – rifleshot spending on infrastructure – actually landed in the bill. Instead, the largest share of spending goes to existing federal programs.
Republicans tripped on a wide open field when they mislabeled the Stimulus a pork barrel bill. They should have embraced working class and middle class suburbanites, arguing that the Stimulus failed to meet the needs of these voters because entitlement obligations and the Democrats’ kamikaze commitment to authorized programs crowds out essential infrastructure spending.
The effects of this crowd out on the Stimulus are staggering.
Of the $575 billion in spending in the bill, only $50 billion will be direct funding from the Department of Transportation for highways, bridges, rail and other infrastructure.
To put this in perspective, the Alexandria, Virginia City Council is now considering the need for a new Metro station at Potomac Yards – the site of massive, high density housing and retail projects set for development. This one station alone might run between $100 and $150 million. No surprise then that The Washington Post found “[t]he more than $1.6 billion for transportation [in the Washington, D.C. area] represents a fraction of what officials said is needed to unclog roads in a region beset with some of the country’s worst commutes.” Yet while neglecting the needs of commuters (commuters who turned toward Obama and are the cause of the Republican collapse in Virginia), the Stimulus still managed to allocate $50 million to the National Endowment for the Arts and $600 million to fleets of green cars for government workers.
The President campaigned to create a smart-grid that will help America to meet its energy needs. Yet the Stimulus devotes a measly $4.4 billion to a project that will run $65 billion over 10-20 years.
And as the high crime patterns of the cities shift toward the suburbs, William Stuntz has noted that the Stimulus pays for only 10,000-15,000 police for 1 year.
The Stimulus will blow $53.6 billion in education aid to the states, but no doubt most of that will go toward teacher-retention and bloat maintenance rather than toward the hard work of getting kids out of trailers and into first rate classrooms.
An increasingly suburban country wants to get to work, deal with the cost and accessibility of energy, and make sure that the crime of the cities does not establish a toehold in their communities. Democrats just passed the largest spending bill in American history, but these needs were not addressed in any meaningful way. And in 4 or 8 years, with little to show from the Stimulus, suburban voters will still be sitting in traffic wondering how their government failed them again.
There is a deal to be had here – one good for Republicans and good for the country – if only Republicans will take it. Suburban working class and college educated voters do not have a dog in the appropriations warfare of a dug-in federal bureaucracy and its interest-group clients. They might not even be fully committed to the current entitlement state. But they do want to get home from work at a decent hour so they can watch their kids grow up.
The deal for Republicans is to trade rifleshot pork – the infrastructure projects that will promote these suburban aspirations – for reductions in the ongoing obligations of the federal government. This deal would help Republicans to develop a geographically broad coalition without threatening their conservative principles. Conservatives should recognize that entitlements and never-diminished authorizations are the true threat to the nation’s fisc and soul. To undermine the ongoing obligations to this interest-group state, Republicans could instead use federal dollars to promote the general welfare by facilitating interstate commerce, expanding social mobility, and benefiting the suburban working and middle class.
Republicans have rightly rejected the spending patterns of Democrats that were unleashed in the Stimulus. But if they learn to selectively promote the projects they now derisively label as pork – the infrastructure necessary for middle class prosperity and happiness – they can drive a wedge into a currently triumphant liberal coalition and begin the long process of conservative recovery.
5 responses so far
1 joemarier // Feb 26, 2009 at 6:17 am
I’d nitpick, but I just don’t feel comfortable criticizing Henry Clay.
2 sinz54 // Feb 26, 2009 at 8:36 am
I am not opposed to improving America’s infrastructure. But infrastructure projects simply do not belong in a “stimulus package.” A true stimulus package is a short-term, temporary quick fix to jump-start an economy that has stumbled. But I know of no infrastructure projects that can be built in the short-term these days. Look at the efforts to replace the World Trade Center in New York. Four years after 9-11, Ground Zero remained an ugly hole in the ground, because developers were still juggling all the inputs and opposition from numerous stakeholders–nearby businesses, community activists, 9-11 families, insurers, etc. Or look at the Big Dig project in Boston to depress the Central Artery highway. Twenty years from conception to completion, for much the same reason. The only proven way to stimulate the economy dramatically in the short term–and short term stimulus is all that is needed–is to cut taxes. It was President Eisenhower–a Republican–who conceived of and initiated the Interstate Highway System. But he didn’t call the project a “stimulus package.” And it took some 30 years to complete. The whole issue of infrastructure should have been decoupled from the issue of economic stimulus. It’s just one more example of what the liberals did–they sneaked in to this so-called “stimulus package” all their long-standing pie-in-the-sky plans to remake America along left-wing lines, and slapped a “stimulus package” label on it in hopes that Americans wouldn’t notice. And there is the fight I hope we will make. We should explain to the American people that they are getting a brand-new welfare state rammed down their throats–secretly. Let’s blow the whistle on it!
3 lc // Feb 26, 2009 at 8:49 am
Everyone hates traffic. Everyone hates crowded roads. Everyone hates excessive spending. So this is right on — spend, but spend wisely on something that improves my life. Something I can see, feel, touch, etc. I even suggested that such projects include a sign alongside the project, “Brought to you by YOU, the American taxpayer, to IMPROVE YOUR life.”
4 Bulldoglover100 // Feb 26, 2009 at 9:28 am
THANK YOU! This should be out there in every format avaliable!
I firmly believe that it will be through discussions such as this that will enable us to find our way out of the wilderness.
5 sinz54 // Feb 26, 2009 at 10:03 am
Bulldoglover100: We’re not going to “find our way out of the wilderness” if we embrace the Democrats’ idea that building roads and shopping centers in our own districts is the way to win votes. At best we will stave off further losses in our own areas. But we still won’t have a weapon of our own with which to defeat Democrats in their own areas. But we must start doing that. We can’t continue to huddle in strongly Red States while writing off nearly the entire rest of the nation.
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