Charles Krauthammer takes a swing at the stimulus today in the Washington Post. Of note, he uses education to illustrate the wastefulness of the unstimulating stimulus:
It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus--and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
Isn't it ironic that the biggest mistakes are often the ones we make the quickest? It's not for nothing that our legislative procedure is a slow and tortured one. Sure, it can drive the purposeful no-nonsense types crazy, but it also prevents insanity--Milwaukee-type insanity.
