Time: On the Stimulus

I couldn’t agree more:

TIME: How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

“A trillion dollars’ worth of bad ideas — sprawl-inducing highways and bridges to nowhere, ethanol plants and pipelines that accelerate global warming, tax breaks for overleveraged McMansion builders and burdensome new long-term federal entitlements — would be worse than mere waste. It would be smarter to buy every American an iPod, a set of Ginsu knives and 600 Subway foot-longs.”

“shovel ready doesn’t necessarily mean shovel-worthy. Many projects are shovel-ready now only because they failed to clear the spectacularly low bar Congress set for pork in the past.”

Even if Keynes wasn’t particular about where deficit spending should go during a recession, we MUST be. 1) we’re too poor, 2) the right (and me) would lose their hypocritical little minds, and 3) it would only pronounce and prolong the issues, if not completely exacerbating them by spending on the same BS that got us into the mess.

“..states like Alabama, Kansas and Texas have been releasing lists of shovel-ready transportation projects that are dramatically skewed toward out-of-the-way sprawl roads. Missouri‘s list was all roads, none of them in St. Louis”

Tell me HOW an over budget DART green line does not make the list? The drawings are finished and the line is being built, yet all it needs is some o’ that hot stinky cash.