California pork highlighted in this WSJ Political Diary Post from Steve Moore…
The Obama administration is defending its slow pay out of stimulus money by insisting that the agencies are making sure the money is going for useful and efficient projects. Only about 8% of the money has been spent so far, even as unemployment has climbed every month. Auditing these stimulus projects to root out waste and pork is a worthy objective, since no one wants $800 billion in earmark projects for bridges to nowhere.
But the administration has recently started posting the projects that are funded on its website www.recovery.gov and it’s not always concrete that workers are shoveling here. Senate Republicans have been identifying waste in the thousands of projects and the money isn’t all going for construction workers, teachers, and firemen. I parsed through a long list of questionable projects that are supposed to be high-priority infrastructure "investments," but failed to meet the laugh test. Here are a few choice misallocations of tax dollars:
- $15 million for an airport for the village of Ouzinkie, Alaska (population 165) on an island off the coast. That’s more than $80,000 per resident.
- $2.5 million for California ham producers — water added, cooked, frozen and sliced.
- $351,000 for the Veterans Administration to replace a dumbwaiter in Brooklyn.
- $1.5 million for producers of mozzarella cheese in Cleveland, Ohio. That should well go well with the sliced ham.
- $16.8 million for canned pork (yes, really).
- $2.2 million to water a Pacifica, CA golf course. Fore!
- $60,000 for Economic Recovery Act signs in Pennsylvania to be posted next to construction projects.
- $16 million to save the San Francisco Bay Area habitat of endangered species, including the salt marsh harvest mouse. House Democrats had promised they would take this project out back in February.
- $7.5 million in stimulus funds for a boardwalk revival in the affluent tourist town of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
- $3.1 million in stimulus money to study seaweed in Corpus Christie, Texas .
- $5 million for the Washington D.C. Zoo.
Even Democrats in Congress are starting to wonder whether all these stimulus projects are creating and saving jobs. New York Democratic Congressman Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has complained that "there is a substantial variation among states as to what constitutes an economically distressed area. For this reason, it is unclear whether Recovery Act funds are going where they are needed most." Perhaps if the money went for real investments, we could even start to put people back to work.
— Stephen Moore