Brad Warthen's Blog

How porky can stimulus be, if Clyburn's not getting his bridge?

There's a certain irony -- not necessarily a contradiction, but irony -- in the fact that Republicans are pinning their opposition to the ginormous stimulus bill the House passed yesterday on allegations that it's just a bunch of pork for Democrats' home districts...

... while the favorite public works proposal of the third most-powerful Democrat in the House is NOT included.

Yes, I get it that Jim Clyburn says it's not for a lack of political will to fund it, but rather a matter of those pesky environmentalists tying it up with a lawsuit. He maintains that if it weren't for the blasted tree-huggers, he'd have gotten the span between Lone Star and Rimini funded.

But it's still ironic. If this project that he has wanted so badly for so long can't make it into an unprecedented, extraordinary $3.2 billion infusion of federal funds into South Carolina, it's probably missed its best chance ever.

As for what IS in the $819 billion extravaganza, I have not audited it to see whether it's pork or not. It does occur to me that just about anything that would meet the standards of what the stimulus is supposed to be -- extra spending, on stuff the federal government would not normally spend on, "shovel-ready" and labor-intensive -- it would probably be something that someone could legitimately call "pork" if they are so inclined. Think about it: What IS pork? Generally, it means something spent in some elected representative's district that would not meet normal standards of being a national spending priority (or state priority, when we're talking pork on that level of government). Well, presumably if it were something that had been determined to be a national priority, it would have been funded already.

Bottom line, I don't know what the percentage of overlap between the two sets (good stimulus projects on the one hand, "pork" on the other) would be -- say, 80 or 90 percent, just to venture a wild guess? -- but it seems like there would be very strong correlation.

Or am I missing something?

Anyway, I made that point to a colleague earlier today, and he said, "Yeah, well what about this mandate that NASA spend on fighting global warming -- that's not a job-producer." I said, "well, it would probably mean jobs for the engineers and techno-geeks required to implement it." He said, "but NASA already has engineers." And I said, "Yes, but if what I was reading in The Economist this morning is correct, a lot of them would otherwise be losing their jobs because Obama doesn't want to follow through on the Bush goals of going back to the Moon and on to Mars." That's gotta mean some latter-day Werner von Brauns joining the unemployment lines. (Which is a whole nother debate I may raise in a separate post.)

I don't know; we're probably both right. Which means Democrats can say this is a great stimulus bill, and Republicans say it's a bunch of pork, and nobody be lying...

NOW they're goin' to messin'

OK, the Chinese can steal our manufacturing capacity, and maybe we'll stand by in the hope of selling that vast market what few products we still make. And they can buy weapons technology from our supposed friends, rattling it at Taiwan, and we'll content ourselves with sending a carrier into the strait now and then. And if they want to massacre their own people and try to keep it a secret, maybe there's little we can do -- our resources may be vast, but they are finite, and we're kind of tied up fighting tyranny elsewhere. We even let them get away with violating the Monroe Doctrine by forming strategic alliances in our own backyard.

But now they're really tromping all over our turf: As this story reports, they're firming up their plans to go stake a claim on the moon:

China will begin an effort to send astronauts to the moon in about 2017, with a landing some time after that, official media said Wednesday, citing a senior official of the lunar probe program.
The moon landing would cap a lunar program begun in 2004 with the launch of a probe. In October, China launched its second manned space flight, a successful five-day mission.

JFK and the nation he led would never have stood still for this, and neither should we. If we're not willing to go back and be there waiting for them, we should still try to defend our claim somehow. What with its being fictional, I don't think the Larkin Decision applies here. We got there first.

Now that I'm done with the chest-thumping, I should point out (for the benefit of the irony-deprived) that I don't think any of that stuff in the first paragraph is OK. I am being somewhat facetious. But we are pretty much standing by and letting it happen, and when you total it all up, it's a disturbing picture. And the moon-landing business just adds to it. We who have done it long ago may snort at the Chinese doing something that is SO last century, but they understand what we understood in the '60s -- such an achievement would have great symbolic value in terms of how the world views them.

And that has enormous value to them in their determined bid to make this the Chinese Century. React to this as you will.