Honest leadership … open government … and the Tooth Fairy. Breitbart and Naked Emperor News catches Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) telling his constituents in a telephonic town hall meeting that the new stimulus bill Democrats will promote in coming weeks is “pretty much similar” to Porkulus, just smaller in scale — which isn’t exactly news, since even Democratic leadership isn’t foolish enough to think they can get another $787 billion after getting nothing more than the loss of 3.4 million jobs from the first one. In an Orwellian admission, Sherman tells listeners that he’s been told not to call it a stimulus bill, but a “jobs bill,” even though he also admits that the jobs won’t come for years later:
Let’s focus on a couple of key points besides the name change to Flying Unicorn Skittle Droppings Jobs Bill. Sherman says he wants the stimulus to go in a certain direction:
“I’ve been pushing for aid to state and local governments. First, because my own state is having such severe problems. And second, from a macroeconomic standpoint, we’re trying to have jobs now, and construction projects, for example — they talk about them being shovel ready, but even if you’re ready to start building a bridge now, a big chunk of that work is going to be done in 2013, 2014.”
Uh, no kidding — we said that last February when Democrats like Sherman insisted on handing Obama a big blank check. Not only that, but the shovel-ready jobs are temporary anyway. Once the bridge is built, the work is done. Accelerating road and public construction work means less work in the near- and mid-term for those workers once the funding spike disappears.
As to his preference on spending, the first bill consisted in large part of those very block grants that Sherman wants again. What did they do? They kept states from doing what they should have done in 2007, which was to start reducing its bureaucracies and learn to live within their means. California is a prime example of this. The state legislature seems incapable of doing math and winds up spending billions of dollars more than they receive, and instead of actually cutting spending, they keep coming to Washington for more bailouts. This, too, was entirely predictable — and I know this because I’ve been predicting it here since Porkulus passed.
The administration likes to take credit for jobs “saved or created,” but a second Porkulus with massive state grants would be saving the exact same jobs that got saved last year in state bureaucracies. Unless we want to make state bailouts a regular feature of federal budgeting, Congress needs to shut down its Porkulus-methadone clinic for junkie states that claim they just need one more fix.
