Republican Bamboozlement

Steven Pearlstein, a business columnist for the Washington Post writes a scathing column asking for a Personal Financial Trainer for every Representative and Senator in Congress. Pearlstein isn’t concerned about overheated rhetoric — he is pointing out the real deficiencies in knowledge here, deficiencies (no matter the policy differences) are actually pretty scary. He finds bipartisan abuses:

(In response to Senator Johanns trying to distinguish between spending and stimulus) Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services — a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

(Discussing Senator Nelson’s claim that $1.1B dollars isn’t effective stimulus)…Maybe the senator could use that opportunity to explain why a dollar spent by the government, or government contractor, to hire doctors, statisticians and software programmers is less stimulative than a dollar spent on hiring civil engineers and bulldozer operators and guys waving orange flags to build highways, which is what the senator says he prefers.

Pearlstein’s excellent rant ends up with what I’m guessing is the real target of the piece — Republicans. If only because they were able to suck up alot of the media space over the past few weeks, they’ve had many chances to show off their real ignorance:

One of the resident wingnuts brought up a portion of the recovery package that is supposed to support honeybees — of course, you consider the source and presume that you are dealing with more manufactured outrage over something silly. Little did I know. Yesterday evening, I found out exactly what she was talking about (column by Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times):

What in heaven’s name does Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have against honeybees?

That question haunted my days after I saw the Kentucky Republican on TV fulminating about a provision he found in the proposed government stimulus package. The provision, he said, would provide $150 million for “honeybee insurance.”

“This is nonsense,” he said, as if he took it personally. You had to think he got stung as a kid or maybe caught a local swarm in the act of recruiting aphids for Al Qaeda.

So I resolved to get to the bottom of this scandalous expenditure.

Hiltzik provides some more background here, so make sure you go read it all, but here is the good part: