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Articles
Stimulus Spending Timed To Favor Dems?
By James Rosen
Sharpening their attacks on one of President Obama’s early legislative
successes, Republican lawmakers have begun charging that the stimulus
spending bill is being used not to create jobs and lift the struggling
economy, as Obama claimed, but to advance the political fortunes of the
Democratic Party.
Republican members of congressional committees that oversee the stimulus
are touting a lengthy list of line items from the nearly $800 billion
spending bill that have received little to no funding in the measure’s
first ten months of existence. And with roughly half of the expenditures
slated to occur during fiscal year 2010, which runs from October 1 of
this year through next September 30, the Republicans allege the spending
is structured and timed to help Democrats in the rough political climate
of the 2010 midterm elections.
“We were told in January we had to pass this massive $787 billion
stimulus program in a hurry, so that the money could get out of town for
shovel-ready job-creating projects,” said Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., a
member of the House Appropriations Committee. "And yet with only 12
percent (of the stimulus funds having been spent), we've got to ask
ourselves: Is the administration – run by the politicals, David Axelrod
and Rahm Emanuel – sitting on the money on purpose, so they can trickle
it out in 2010, the election year?”
Republicans on the Appropriations Committee have disseminated figures,
covering Fiscal Year 2009, to demonstrate the slowness with which
stimulus funding is being doled out . An analysis by the committee’s
minority staff noted, for example, that of the nearly $6 billion
authorized in the stimulus package for energy efficiency measures, only
$3 million – less than one percent of the authorization – had been
spent. For “smart grid” projects, which employ digital technology to
regulate the use of energy-consuming appliances in private homes, none
of the $4.5 billion authorized had been spent. And for weatherization
initiatives, $174 million of the total $5 billion authorized, or some
three percent, had been spent.
“The Pentagon spends money rapidly, FEMA [the Federal Emergency
Management Agency] spends money rapidly,” said Kingston. “We have had
models where the bureaucracy can actually get the money out of town. And
yet on this one – which, again, was passed in this great fervor of
urgency – the money is still here in Washington, D.C.
“The bureaucracy is sitting on the money. And I don’t even think they're
that incompetent, that it's been slowed because of the bureaucracy. I
think it’s going to be drummed out during the election year.”
Obama signed the stimulus package, officially titled the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act, into law on February 17. “It will create
or save 3.5 million jobs over the next two years,” Obama said after
signing the legislation, at a museum in Denver, Colorado. Since then and
through November, according to calculations using seasonally-adjusted
total non-farm employment figures published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics, more than 2.8 million jobs have been lost. However, the
Congressional Budget Office estimates that through September, an
additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed who would not
have been had there been no stimulus package.
It is true that the bulk of the stimulus spending is slated to occur
next year, when all 435 House seats and more than a third of the 100
Senate seats will be in play. According to budget documents posted on
the White House website, some $198 billion, or roughly 24 percent of the
total funds appropriated in the stimulus package, were spent in Fiscal
Year 2009. That number will balloon to $390 billion – roughly 48
percent, or nearly half of all stimulus funds – in Fiscal Year 2010. And
another $238 million, or roughly 28 percent of the total, will be
expended in Fiscal Year 2011 and beyond.
Key Democratic lawmakers emphatically rejected the Republicans’ charges
that the spending is being manipulated to affect the outcome of the
midterm elections. “I don’t think it’s fair at all,” said Rep. John
Yarmuth, D-Ky., who sits on the Budget and Ways and Means Committees.
“The entire concept and structure of the Recovery Act was staggered,
spread over two years. That was the intention from the beginning. We
knew it would take some time to ramp up. And you know we didn't create
the recession that started, and almost crashed the economy, last year;
the Republicans did that. The timing was theirs, not ours. We had to act
early this year. We've acted. It's had an effect.”
Yarmuth cited his own district in northwestern Kentucky, which includes
Louisville, as evidence of the economic activity spurred by the stimulus
package. He said some 2,400 stimulus-funded projects, accounting for up
to $450 million, are presently underway there.
A listing of the twenty-five congressional districts that have received
the most funds in the early stimulus spending, through the end of Fiscal
Year 2009, shows only eight of them are represented by a Republican or
“Blue Dog” (fiscally conservative) Democrat. New York’s 21st District,
which includes the state capital of Albany, leads the list with some
$4.2 billion in appropriations; California’s fifth, which includes the
state capital of Sacramento, ranks second, with $3.7 million; Texas’s
21st, represented by Rep. Lamar Smith, an influential Republican, comes
in third; the District of Columbia places fourth; and Washington state’s
4th district, also represented by a Republican, is fifth.
Yet Michael Balsam of Onvia, a Seattle-based firm that has been tracking
stimulus spending, also discounted political motivations in the flow of
dollars from the Beltway to local projects. “The impact from the
stimulus from this year will really start to hit the ground in local
communities in 2010,” Balsam told Fox News. “The money has left the
beltway, but it hasn’t been directly spent with the contractors that
actually put people to work.”
Longtime students of Capitol Hill say large spending bills like the
Recovery Act typically reflect a mix of public policy and partisan
political objectives. “Appropriators,” said Fox News contributor Michael
Barone, a columnist with U.S. News & World Report, “want to benefit what
they think is for the public good, and that may include the good of
their political party.”
As evidence of the instinctive impulse among lawmakers to protect their
own, Barone pointed to the stimulus measure’s stream of funding to state
and municipal governments. “That was with the intention and the effect
of preventing layoffs of state and local public employees, who are also
in many states public employee union members. That's kept the flow of
money going to the public employee unions, who contributed hundreds of
millions of dollars to the Democratic Party in the 2008 cycle.”
Another factor, said Barone, is the complexity of the modern
appropriations process. “The federal government is just not as good at
spending money rapidly as it was back in the days of Franklin Roosevelt
in the 1930s,” he said. “The New Dealers, people like [Roosevelt
adviser] Harry Hopkins and [Interior Secretary] Harold Ickes in the
federal government, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, could literally
gin up public payrolls within a matter of weeks and get large numbers of
people working. They didn't have to undergo these environmental reviews,
the lawsuits, the various administrative procedures the federal
government is now burdened by. So the fact is that when you authorize a
lot of federal spending, you don’t get the money actually spent very
soon in many cases.”
Source: Foxnews.
Capitol Hill. December 16, 2009.
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