Pelosi's Indefensible Bill. For Barack Obama, a cautionary tale of audacity.

Martin Kozlowski

Historians tell us it was Roman custom to place a slave in the chariot behind a conquering hero, there to whisper warnings about the fleeting nature of fame amid the accolades of adoring crowds.

Martin Kozlowski

Barack Obama is no stranger to the cheers of roaring crowds. If his prime-time press conference last night is any clue, moreover, he intends to use this personal popularity to help Congress get a stimulus bill to his desk quickly. As he does, those who wish his presidency success might do well to whisper in his ear two words of tempering wisdom: "Nancy Pelosi."

In the public eye as well as on Capitol Hill, the California Democrat has become the mother of all stimulus packages. Whatever issues Mrs. Pelosi may claim with the Senate version, her leadership has defined the direction. Her intransigence has set the tone. And her penchant for excess helps explain why out of 535 members of Congress, only three Republicans seem willing to go anywhere near the thing.

Therein lies a cautionary tale.

In the afterglow of President Obama's inauguration, it's easy to forget that Mrs. Pelosi's similarly historic elevation to the speaker's chair just two years ago had its own elements of a coronation -- and its own claims of change we were to believe in.

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Like President Obama, who characterized his ascent to the White House as a mark of "how far we have traveled," Speaker Pelosi spoke of her swearing in as a "moment for which we have waited more than 200 years."

Like President Obama, whose supporters made ubiquitous a red, white and blue image of the candidate over the word "hope," Speaker Pelosi's supporters brandished their own icon at her swearing-in: commemorative buttons depicting her as Rosie the Riveter flexing her muscle.

And like President Obama, Speaker Pelosi heralded her election as "a call to change." In her acceptance speech, she put it this way: "We have made history," she said. "Now let us make progress for our new America."

That was January 2007. Before the year was out, her approval ratings would be lower than George W. Bush's.

Under her leadership, Congress failed to pass a single appropriations bill until early November. Congress also failed to override the president's veto on what Democrats thought would be an easy win for an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Most significant of all, Congress failed to force Mr. Bush to begin what Democrats had said was their real goal: a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The way Mrs. Pelosi handled Iraq has some interesting parallels to the way she is now handling the stimulus. In the early months of her speakership, the Democratic Congress faced its first test on Iraq in the form of a war funding bill. Mrs. Pelosi's response? To lard it up with billions in unrelated domestic spending -- including a now infamous provision that would have spent $74 million for peanut storage.

In many ways, Mrs. Pelosi's decisions would make it easier for Mr. Bush to get his war funding through her Congress. While the president argued for supporting our troops, Democrats were forced to defend pork. And though Mr. Bush was ultimately forced to accept more domestic spending than he would have preferred, on the central issue -- funding for the war -- he got what he wanted without agreeing to a timetable for withdrawal.

Just as she did with war funding, Mrs. Pelosi is once again putting her fellow Democrats -- Mr. Obama included -- in the position of defending the indefensible. And she let it all ride on a game of chicken. Her bet has been that a Republican minority would sooner or later cry "uncle" on a laundry list of pet Democratic spending projects rather than risk being painted as holding up vital economic legislation.

But a funny thing happened: House Republicans called her bluff. The result has been more attention to the content of the legislation passing through Congress. And as the focus on content has increased, the American people have grown more skeptical.

In public, Mr. Obama may tell us the problem is the lack of Republican support. But if he is as comfortable with the stimulus as he says, if the bills under consideration are really the tonic our economy needs, if by not passing a stimulus immediately we truly risk catastrophe, and if the American people are going to call the Republicans to account for not going along, why all the fuss? Why not just have it passed on your own, and take full credit.

Unless, of course, even Democrats are beginning to hear whispers of "Nancy Pelosi" ringing in their ears.

Write to MainStreet@wsj.com

Obama's Charm Isn't Working Wonders Abroad. Policy does matter after all.

Barack Obama has now been president for 21 days, following an inauguration that was supposed to have pressed the reset button on America's relations with the wider world and ushered in a new period of global cooperation against common threats. Here's what pressing reset has accomplished so far:

- Iran. Since President Obama's inauguration, Iran has launched a satellite into space and declared (with an assist from Russia, which is providing the nuclear fuel) that it would complete its long-delayed reactor at Bushehr later this year. At the Munich Security Conference last week, Iranian parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani promised a "golden opportunity for the United States" in its relations with the Islamic Republic. He proceeded to make good on that opportunity by skipping Joe Biden's speech the next day.

Also, as if to underscore that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-denial is merely emblematic of his regime's outlook, Mr. Larijani offered that there could be "different perspectives on the Holocaust." Mr. Larijani is widely described as a "moderate."

- Afghanistan. This is the war Mr. Obama has said "we have to win" -- as opposed to Iraq. Our NATO allies are supposed to feel the same way.

So what was NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer doing at the Munich conclave? Why, reproaching our allies. "When the United States asks for a serious partner, it does not just want advice, it wants and deserves someone to share the heavy lifting," he said.

But the plea fell on deaf ears. Germany will not, and probably cannot, commit more than 4,500 soldiers to Afghanistan, and then only to areas where they are unlikely to see combat. The French have no plans to increase their troop commitment beyond the 3,300 now there. Mr. Obama, by contrast, may double the U.S. commitment to 60,000 troops.

- North Korea. A constant liberal lament about the Bush administration was that its supposed hard line on Pyongyang had yielded nothing except five or six North Korean bombs.

So what is Kim Jong Il to do now that the Obama administration is promising a friendlier approach? In late January, Pyongyang announced it was unilaterally withdrawing from its 1991 nonaggression pact with the South.

Satellite imagery later showed the North moving a Taepodong 2 missile -- potentially capable of reaching the U.S. West Coast -- to a launch pad. "The missile is pointing at Obama," Baek Seung-joo, a director at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul, told the L.A. Times. "North Korea thinks that with such gestures they can control U.S. foreign policy."

- Pakistan. Perhaps the most unambiguous of the Bush administration's successes was rolling up the nuclear proliferation network of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, who was kept under house arrest for five years.

But if some latent fear of the 43rd American president prevented the Pakistani government from releasing their dubious national hero, that fear clearly vanished with the arrival of the 44th. Mr. Khan was released last week, ostensibly by order of a Pakistani court, plainly with the consent of the government. So far, the Obama administration has done little more than issue a muted statement of concern.

- Russia. At the Munich conference, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov praised the "very positive" tone set by Mr. Biden. And Mr. Ivanov's tone? Less positive. Russia will continue to build military bases in Georgia's breakaway republics. It will press ahead with the fueling of the Bushehr reactor.

Russia also won't hesitate to complicate the U.S. position in Afghanistan -- and then lie about what it has done in a manner worthy of the late Andrei Gromyko. "There is no correlation between the decision of the Kyrgyz republic and the loans that the Russian federation granted," Mr. Ivanov said, referring to Kyrgyzstan's oddly timed decision to close an airbase used by the U.S. to supply Afghanistan after securing a $2 billion Russian "loan."

- The Arab street. "I have Muslim members of my family," Mr. Obama recently told Al-Arabiya. Yet so far his efforts at outreach have been met with derision from Arab hard-liners and "liberals" alike.

"We welcomed him with almost total enthusiasm until he underwent his first real test: Gaza," wrote Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany in a New York Times op-ed. "We also wanted Mr. Obama . . . to recognize . . . the right of people in occupied territory to resist military occupation." In other words, the price of Arab support for Mr. Obama is that he embrace Hamas and its terrorist tactics.

And so it goes. True, Mr. Obama has made the U.S. popular in places like Montreal and Berlin, where our unpopularity never mattered much to begin with. But foreign policy is not about winning popularity contests. And woe to the president who imagines he needn't inspire fear among the wicked even as he embraces the adulation of the good.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

What Is Congress Stimulating? What's most striking is how much "stimulus" money will be spent on the government itself.

Contrary to conventional Beltway wisdom, the House Republicans' zero votes for the Obama presidency's stimulus "package" is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the GOP's political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties. If the GOP line holds, the party could win back much of the goodwill it dissipated with its big-government adventures the past eight years.

Face the Nation, Karin Cooper

'How big?' senator, is not the question.

For starters, notwithstanding the new president's high approval rating, his stimulus bill (ghost-written by Nancy Pelosi) has been losing altitude with public opinion by the day. People are nervous.

Then after Tim Geithner scampered through the tax minefield and into a Cabinet seat, the Daschle tax bomb went off, laying open for public view the world of Washington's pay-for-favors that makes the average Wall Street banker look like Little Bo-Peep.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Republican refuseniks shot themselves in the foot by staying off the House stimulus package. Real wisdom holds that congressional Republicans should consider putting distance between themselves and anything Democratic just now. The party's crypts are opening.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with an apparently recession-proof cash hoard, is running radio ads against 28 House Republicans. The theme of the ads is "Putting Families First."

Families first? The only family standing at the front of the stimulus pay line is the federal family. Read the bill.

Wonder Land columnist Daniel Henninger asks why our government needs stimulus money. (Feb. 5)

Check your PC's virus program, then pull down the nearly 700 pages of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Dive into its dank waters and what is most striking is how much "stimulus" money is being spent on the government's own infrastructure. This bill isn't economic stimulus. It's self-stimulus.

(All sums here include the disorienting zeros, as in the bill.)

Title VI, Financial Services and General Government, says that "not less than $6,000,000,000 shall be used for construction, repair, and alteration of Federal buildings." There's enough money there to name a building after every Member of Congress.

The Bureau of Land Management gets $325,000,000 to spend fixing federal land, including "trail repair" and "remediation of abandoned mines or well sites," no doubt left over from the 19th-century land rush.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are getting $462,000,000 for "equipment, construction, and renovation of facilities, including necessary repairs and improvements to leased laboratories."

The National Institute of Standards gets $357,000,000 for the "construction of research facilities." The Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gets $427,000,000 for that. The country is in an economic meltdown and the federal government is redecorating.

The FBI gets $75,000,000 for "salaries and expenses." Inside the $6,200,000,000 Weatherization Assistance Program one finds "expenses" of $500,000,000. How many bureaucrats does it take to "expense" a half-billion dollars?

The current, Senate-amended version now lists "an additional amount to be deposited in the Federal Buildings Fund, $9,048,000,000." Of this, "not less than $6,000,000,000 shall be available for measures necessary to convert GSA facilities to High-Performance Green Buildings." High performance?

Sen. Tom Coburn is threatening to read the bill on the floor of the Senate. I have a better idea: Read it on "Saturday Night Live."

Such as the amendment to Section 2(3)(F) of the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, which will permit payments to guys employed to repair "recreational vessels." Under Incentives for New Jobs, we find a credit to employ what the bill calls "disconnected youths," defined as "not readily employable by reason of lacking a sufficient number of basic skills."

President Obama is saying the bill will "create or save" three million new jobs. The bad news is your new boss is Uncle Sam.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says, "Everybody agrees that there ought to be a stimulus package. The question is: How big and what do we spend it on?"

Sen. McConnell should reconsider. He knows that the Bush-GOP spending spree cost them control of Congress in 2006. Thus, "How big?" is not the question his party's constituents (or horrified independents) want answered. This is a chance for the GOP to climb down from its big-government dunce chair. Until that reversal is achieved, there is no hope for this party.

I think that behind the bill's sinking public support is the sense that it won't work and its cost is dangerous. The bill's design, an embarrassment to Rube Goldberg, is flawed. Even were one to grant the Keynesians their argument, this is a very mushy, weak-form stimulus.

Rather than try to "reform" it, which won't happen, Sen. McConnell should ask President Obama to pull it and start over. One guesses that privately the president's economic team would thank the senator. If he won't pull it, the Senate Republicans should walk away from it. This bill is a bomb. It may wreck more than it saves.

U2 beginning sessions in a converted riad

The Observer Music Monthly's Sean O'Hagan spent 18 months following U2, from Fez to Dublin, as they recorded their new album New Line On The Horizon. Part one of our world exclusive film captures the band beginning sessions in a converted riad. In part two, next week, the band continue recording in Dublin, New York and London, and you can read the full interview and story of the album in next week's OMM

50 De-Stimulating Facts

Senate Democrats acknowledged Wednesday that they do not have the votes to pass the stimulus bill in its current form. This is unexpected good news. The House passed the stimulus package with zero Republican votes (and even a few Democratic defections), but few expected Senate Republicans (of whom there are only 41) to present a unified front. A few moderate Democrats have reportedly joined them.

The idea that the government can spend the economy out of a recession is highly questionable, and even with Senate moderates pushing for changes, the current package is unlikely to see much improvement. Nevertheless, this presents an opportunity to remove some of the most egregious spending, to shrink some programs, and to add guidelines where the initial bill called for a blank check. Here are 50 of the most outrageous items in the stimulus package:


VARIOUS LEFT-WINGERY
The easiest targets in the stimulus bill are the ones that were clearly thrown in as a sop to one liberal cause or another, even though the proposed spending would have little to no stimulative effect. The National Endowment for the Arts, for example, is in line for $50 million, increasing its total budget by a third. The unemployed can fill their days attending abstract-film festivals and sitar concerts.

Then there are the usual welfare-expansion programs that sound nice but repeatedly fail cost-benefit analyses. The bill provides $380 million to set up a rainy-day fund for a nutrition program that serves low-income women and children, and $300 million for grants to combat violence against women. Laudable goals, perhaps, but where’s the economic stimulus? And the bill would double the amount spent on federal child-care subsidies. Brian Riedl, a budget expert with the Heritage Foundation, quips, “Maybe it’s to help future Obama cabinet secretaries, so that they don’t have to pay taxes on their nannies.”

Perhaps spending $6 billion on university building projects will put some unemployed construction workers to work, but how does a $15 billion expansion of the Pell Grant program meet the standard of “temporary, timely, and targeted”? Another provision would allocate an extra $1.2 billion to a “youth” summer-jobs program—and increase the age-eligibility limit from 21 to 24. Federal job-training programs—despite a long track record of failure—come in for $4 billion total in additional funding through the stimulus.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a liberal wish list if it didn’t include something for ACORN, and sure enough, there is $5.2 billion for community-development block grants and “neighborhood stabilization activities,” which ACORN is eligible to apply for. Finally, the bill allocates $650 million for activities related to the switch from analog to digital TV, including $90 million to educate “vulnerable populations” that they need to go out and get their converter boxes or lose their TV signals. Obviously, this is stimulative stuff: Any economist will tell you that you can’t get higher productivity and economic growth without access to reruns of Family Feud.

Summary:
$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”

POORLY DESIGNED TAX RELIEF
The stimulus package’s tax provisions are poorly designed and should be replaced with something closer to what the Republican Study Committee in the House has proposed. Obama would extend some of the business tax credits included in the stimulus bill Congress passed about a year ago, and this is good as far as it goes. The RSC plan, however, also calls for a cut in the corporate-tax rate that could be expected to boost wages, lower prices, and increase profits, stimulating economic activity across the board.

The RSC plan also calls for a 5 percent across-the-board income-tax cut, which would increase productivity by providing additional incentives to save, work, and invest. An across-the-board payroll-tax cut might make even more sense, especially for low- to middle-income workers who don’t make enough to pay income taxes. Obama’s “Making Work Pay” tax credit is aimed at helping these workers, but it uses a rebate check instead of a rate cut. Rebate checks are not effective stimulus, as we discovered last spring: They might boost consumption, a little, but that’s all they do.

Finally, the RSC proposal provides direct tax relief to strapped families by expanding the child tax credit, reducing taxes on parents’ investment in the next generation of taxpayers. Obama’s expansion of the child tax credit is not nearly as ambitious. Overall, his plan adds up to a lot of forgone revenue without much stimulus to show for it. Senators should push for the tax relief to be better designed.

Summary:
$15 billion for business-loss carry-backs
$145 billion for “Making Work Pay” tax credits
$83 billion for the earned income credit


STIMULUS FOR THE GOVERNMENT
Even as their budgets were growing robustly during the Bush administration, many federal agencies couldn’t find the money to keep up with repairs—at least that’s the conclusion one is forced to draw from looking at the stimulus bill. Apparently the entire capital is a shambles. Congress has already removed $200 million to fix up the National Mall after word of that provision leaked out and attracted scorn. But one fixture of the mall—the Smithsonian—dodged the ax: It’s slated to receive $150 million for renovations.

The stimulus package is packed with approximately $7 billion worth of federal building projects, including $34 million to fix up the Commerce Department, $500 million for improvements to National Institutes of Health facilities, and $44 million for repairs at the Department of Agriculture. The Agriculture Department would also get $350 million for new computers—the better to calculate all the new farm subsidies in the bill (see “Pure pork” below).

One theme in this bill is superfluous spending items coated with green sugar to make them more palatable. Both NASA and NOAA come in for appropriations that properly belong in the regular budget, but this spending apparently qualifies for the stimulus bill because part of the money from each allocation is reserved for climate-change research. For instance, the bill grants NASA $450 million, but it states that the agency must spend at least $200 million on “climate-research missions,” which raises the question: Is there global warming in space?

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.”

Summary:
$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


INCOME TRANSFERS
A big chunk of the stimulus package is designed not to create wealth but to spread it around. It contains $89 billion in Medicaid extensions and $36 billion in expanded unemployment benefits—and this is in addition to the state-budget bailout (see “Rewarding state irresponsibility” below).

The Medicaid extension is structured as a temporary increase in the federal match, but make no mistake: Like many spending increases in the stimulus package, this one has a good chance of becoming permanent. As for extending unemployment benefits through the downturn, it might be a good idea for other reasons, but it wouldn’t stimulate economic growth: It would provide an incentive for job-seekers to delay reentry into the workforce.

Summary:
$89 billion for Medicaid
$30 billion for COBRA insurance extension
$36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits
$20 billion for food stamps


PURE PORK
The problem with trying to spend $1 trillion quickly is that you end up wasting a lot of it. Take, for instance, the proposed $4.5 billion addition to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers budget. Not only does this effectively double the Corps’ budget overnight, but it adds to the Corps’ $3.2 billion unobligated balance—money that has been appropriated, but that the Corps has not yet figured out how to spend. Keep in mind, this is an agency that is often criticized for wasting taxpayers’ money. “They cannot spend that money wisely,” says Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “I don’t even think they can spend that much money unwisely.”

Speaking of spending money unwisely, the stimulus bill adds another $850 million for Amtrak, the railroad that can’t turn a profit. There’s also $1.7 billion for “critical deferred maintenance needs” in the National Park System, and $55 million for the preservation of historic landmarks. Also, the U.S. Coast Guard needs $87 million for a polar icebreaking ship—maybe global warming isn’t working fast enough.

It should come as no surprise that rural communities—those parts of the nation that were hardest hit by rampant real-estate speculation and the collapse of the investment-banking industry—are in dire need of an additional $7.6 billion for “advancement programs.” Congress passed a $300 billion farm bill last year, but apparently that wasn’t enough. This bill provides additional subsidies for farmers, including $150 million for producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish.

Summary:
$4.5 billion for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
$850 million for Amtrak
$87 million for a polar icebreaking ship
$1.7 billion for the National Park System
$55 million for Historic Preservation Fund
$7.6 billion for “rural community advancement programs”
$150 million for agricultural-commodity purchases
$150 million for “producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish”


RENEWABLE WASTE
Open up the section of the stimulus devoted to renewable energy and what you find is anti-stimulus: billions of dollars allocated to money-losing technologies that have not proven cost-efficient despite decades of government support. “Green energy” is not a new idea, Riedl points out. The government has poured billions into loan-guarantees and subsidies and has even mandated the use of ethanol in gasoline, to no avail. “It is the triumph of hope over experience,” he says, “to think that the next $20 billion will magically transform the economy.”

Many of the renewable-energy projects in the stimulus bill are duplicative. It sets aside $3.5 billion for energy efficiency and conservation block grants, and $3.4 billion for the State Energy Program. What’s the difference? Well, energy efficiency and conservation block grants “assist eligible entities in implementing energy efficiency and conservation strategies,” while the State Energy Program “provides funding to states to design and carry out their own energy efficiency and renewable energy programs.”

While some programs would spend lavishly on technologies that are proven failures, others would spend too little to make a difference. The stimulus would spend $4.5 billion to modernize the nation’s electricity grid. But as Robert Samuelson has pointed out, “An industry study in 2004—surely outdated—put the price tag of modernizing the grid at $165 billion.” Most important, the stimulus bill is not the place to make these changes. There is a regular authorization process for energy spending; Obama is just trying to take a shortcut around it.

Summary:
$2 billion for renewable-energy research ($400 million for global-warming research)
$2 billion for a “clean coal” power plant in Illinois
$6.2 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program
$3.5 billion for energy-efficiency and conservation block grants
$3.4 billion for the State Energy Program
$200 million for state and local electric-transport projects
$300 million for energy-efficient-appliance rebate programs
$400 million for hybrid cars for state and local governments
$1 billion for the manufacturing of advanced batteries
$1.5 billion for green-technology loan guarantees
$8 billion for innovative-technology loan-guarantee program
$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects
$4.5 billion for electricity grid


REWARDING STATE IRRESPONSIBILITY
One of the ugliest aspects of the stimulus package is a bailout for spendthrift state legislatures. Remember the old fable about the ant and the grasshopper? In Aesop’s version, the happy-go-lucky grasshopper realizes the error of his ways when winter comes and he goes hungry while the industrious ant lives on his stores. In Obama’s version, the federal government levies a tax on the ant and redistributes his wealth to the party-hearty grasshopper, who just happens to belong to a government-employees’ union. This happens through something called the “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund,” by which taxpayers in the states that have exercised financial discipline are raided to subsidize Democratic-leaning Electoral College powerhouses—e.g., California—that have spent their way into big trouble.

The state-bailout fund has a built-in provision to channel the money to the Democrats’ most reliable group of campaign donors: the teachers’ unions. The current bill requires that a fixed percentage of the bailout money go toward ensuring that school budgets are not reduced below 2006 levels. Given that the fastest-growing segment of public-school expense is administrators’ salaries—not teachers’ pay, not direct spending on classroom learning—this is a requirement that has almost nothing to do with ensuring high-quality education and everything to do with ensuring that the school bureaucracy continues to be a cash cow for Democrats.

Setting aside this obvious sop to Democratic constituencies, the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund is problematic in that it creates a moral hazard by punishing the thrifty to subsidize the extravagant. California, which has suffered the fiscal one-two punch of a liberal, populist Republican governor and a spendthrift Democratic legislature, is in the worst shape, but even this fiduciary felon would have only to scale back spending to Gray Davis–era levels to eliminate its looming deficit. (The Davis years are not remembered as being especially austere.) Pennsylvania is looking to offload much of its bloated corrections-system budget onto Uncle Sam in order to shunt funds to Gov. Ed Rendell’s allies at the county-government level, who will use that largesse to put off making hard budgetary calls and necessary reforms. Alaska is looking for a billion bucks, including $630 million for transportation projects—not a great sign for the state that brought us the “Bridge to Nowhere” fiasco.

Other features leap out: Of the $4 billion set aside for the Community Oriented Policing Services—COPS—program, half is allocated for communities of fewer than 150,000 people. That’s $2 billion to fight nonexistent crime waves in places like Frog Suck, Wyo., and Hoople, N.D.

The great French economist Frédéric Bastiat called politics “the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” But who pays for the state bailout? Savers will pay to bail out spenders, and future generations will pay to bail out the undisciplined present.

In sum, this is an $80 billion boondoggle that is going to reward the irresponsible and help state governments evade a needed reordering of their financial priorities. And the money has to come from somewhere: At best, we’re just shifting money around from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, robbing a relatively prudent Cheyenne to pay an incontinent Albany. If we want more ants and fewer grasshoppers, let the prodigal governors get a little hungry.

Summary:
$79 billion for State Fiscal Stabilization Fund

— Stephen Spruiell is a staff reporter for National Review Online. Kevin Williamson is a deputy managing editor of National Review.