Un-Liberaled Woman

The guys at National Review take another fine lookover of the porkulus bill since nobody in Congress or the WH seems to be doing so except a few Blue Dog Dems and Republicans. (via Alarming News) Here’s just a brief list of some of the “necessities” we need to spend billions of taxpayer’s hard earned money on:

• $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
• $380 million in the Senate bill for the Women, Infants and Children program
• $300 million for grants to combat violence against women
• $2 billion for federal child-care block grants
• $6 billion for university building projects
• $15 billion for boosting Pell Grant college scholarships
• $4 billion for job-training programs, including $1.2 billion for “youths” up to the age of 24
• $1 billion for community-development block grants
• $4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities”
• $650 million for digital-TV coupons; $90 million to educate “vulnerable populations”’

Also, if you look deep into the appropriations you’ll see that much of this porkulus for infrastructure projects is for much of the Beltway area. Super, so DC’s economy will be flowing with renovation and construction projects, but ummmm what about the rest of the country???  So goes DC, so goes the nation – is that our new motto? And while I’m all for infrastructure projects, as many people know they only make up a small, small portion of this entire bill.  The National Review’s got more:

• $150 million for the Smithsonian
• $34 million to renovate the Department of Commerce headquarters
• $500 million for improvement projects for National Institutes of Health facilities
• $44 million for repairs to Department of Agriculture headquarters
• $350 million for Agriculture Department computers
• $88 million to help move the Public Health Service into a new building
• $448 million for constructing a new Homeland Security Department headquarters
• $600 million to convert the federal auto fleet to hybrids
• $450 million for NASA (carve-out for “climate-research missions”)
• $600 million for NOAA (carve-out for “climate modeling”)
• $1 billion for the Census Bureau

I think this quote in the article sums it up best in my feelings on how far this porkulus will benefit our economy – The bottom line is that there is a way to fund government agencies, and that is the federal budget, not an “emergency” stimulus package. As Riedl puts it, “Amount allocated to the Census Bureau? $1 billion. Jobs created? None.”

There’s so much more I didn’t cover in this trillion-dollar boondoggle disaster. Read the article over at National Review to check out the full facts. Happy Govt. Frivolous Spending Day!