As Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal pointed out during his recent much maligned speech responding to Barack Obama’s faux State of the Nation Address, there is some real garbage in the recent stimulus. Once again, lawmakers have insisted upon inserting huge amounts of pork into this bill that was supposed to be about job creation and stimulating the economy.
Even worse than the usual dosage of pork that we get from congress, the pork in this bill is especially egregious in that this bill was never properly marked up in committee. Rather, the Administration rammed a compromise version through congress, refusing to allow even 12 hours for members to review the bill. The justification for this was the need for “quick” action. As a result of this threat construction, numerous appropriations in the bill that no one ever read are most likely known to no one but their authors and a few members of leadership.
It was these wasteful and un-justified appropriations that Bobby Jindal was attacking in his recent speech. Specifically, he targeted funding of certain volcano monitoring programs that the stimulus has apparently felt necessary. In response, the media has chastised him for daring to question funding for such important programs that save lives when active volcanoes explode.
Admittedly, Jindal could have selected a much better target for his ire, and there are many, to avoid these attacks. However, the central issue remains. I seriously doubt that these volcano monitoring programs will significantly increase jobs. While I’m not an expert, I assume they will primarily require one time installation labor, and perhaps a few individuals to monitor them. Furthermore, the kinds of people that will be employed through this appropriation are the well-educated elite that are not the class most effected by the recent economic downturn. No blue-collar, low-income individuals will benefit from this.
In light of this, it seems that the volcano monitoring initiative does not meet the threshold of credibility for inclusion in the stimulus. While this may well be a worthwhile and even necessary program to fund, there is no reason that it can’t be included in the regular appropriations bill for the Interior Department. We have known about the danger that volcanoes pose to communities for years. If this program was so necessary, why hasn’t the money been appropriated before?
In conclusion, the main problem that I see here is procedural. If we justify circumventing the traditional appropriations process for this non-emergency program and others, we will ultimately find ourselves up to our eyeballs in earmarks as the committee review process is ignored more and more often. This ought not to be the direction the Democratic Congress wants to go down after prommising to be the most “open” and “ethical” ever only two years ago.
