Last week I blogged on President Obama’s “stimulus” rally prop Henrietta Hughes — a.k.a. “the face of the economic crisis.” Ms. Hughes and her son, who were homeless, asked our messianic president to help them since they’ve been stuck on a two-year waiting list at the Fort Myers, Fl., public housing authority. Using the government’s own numbers, I was able to determine that Fort Myers and surrounding Lee County received almost $70 million in U.S. Housing & Urban Development (HUD) money in the past three years. Some $41 million — or $600 per man, woman, and child in Fort Myers — went to the city’s public housing authority alone.

I concluded that HUD’s inspector general should investigate what the housing authority is doing with all that taxpayer change. And if a story coming out of Las Vegas about its public housing authority is any indicator, there’s a good chance a lack of federal funding wasn’t the problem in Fort Myers. According to the Las Vegas Sun,

The Senate stimulus bill apparently contains $2 billion for “FutureGen.” Here is what my assistant, Harrison Moar, found out about this project:

FutureGen was launched in 2003 by President Bush as a public-private partnership to build a low-emission coal-fueled power plant and demonstrate technologies to capture carbon dioxide. The government was to share the cost of the project with 12 private energy companies. The project was originally estimated to cost $1 billion, but by 2008 the estimate had ballooned to $1.8 billion. By mid-2008, $176 million had been spent.

In 2007, the Department of Energy chose a single site for the project in Mattoon, Illinois. But after the project’s estimated cost started soaring, the department changed direction in 2008 and cancelled the Mattoon project. That was a good decision, but the government had still flushed $176 million down the drain. The department’s new idea was to focus on developing other clean coal projects in different locations at an estimated taxpayer cost of $1.3 billion.

FutureGen has involved pork barrel politics since the beginning. As the department originally considered various project sites in Illinois and Texas, the state governments in those states deployed aggressive lobbying to woo federal officials. Upon news of possible cancellation of the Mattoon project in 2008, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois swung into action using all his tools as the second-ranking senator to continue the funding to his state. He even threatened to block appointments to the Department of Energy unless it reversed its cancellation decision.

House Democrats have released a $825 billion plan to “stimulate” the nation’s economy. After reading through the 13-page press release, it is blatantly obvious to me that the proposal is nothing more than a conglomeration of traditional special interest favorites. Education pork? Check. Science pork? Check. Transportation pork? Check. Pork for state and local governments? Check and check.

Cato scholars have written extensively on most of the plan’s components at one time or another. For instance, anyone interested in the alleged stimulative power of more federal dollars being spent on higher education should check out Neal McCluskey’s post from Friday. Or see Chris Edwards and Peter Van Doren on infrastructure spending in this nifty piece.

In no particular order, I thought I’d pick out some of the programs targeted for “stimulating” and provide an example of how taxpayers can expect their money to be spent. Lest anyone think I’m cherry-picking, the following hardly scratches the surface:

Before 1987, Americans only needed to understand the word “billion” to get a handle on federal budget numbers. Today, the word “trillion” is the needed metric in budget discussions.

The Congressional Budget Office released an update to its budget projections today, and the figures show that the federal deficit for fiscal 2009 will be $1.2 trillion. That deficit represents 8.3 percent of GDP, the highest share of the economy since World War II. Thus, a burden the size of 8 percent of all income earned in the United States this year is being thrust onto tomorrow’s taxpayers.

Sorry, this blog has nothing to do with the Wall Street mess, despite the title.

Instead, consider this tiny story in the WaPo that reveals the general inanity of our subsidized nation. The article, “Federal Grant to Provide Help To Low-Income Students” reports on a $1 million federal grant to the state of Virginia. 

Will the grant money be used to buy books for poor kids, or to help pay their tuition? Nope. It will go to hire bureaucrats to train kids on how to grab more education subsidies: “The agency plans … to help educate students about college, with a sizable focus on how to obtain financial aid.”

For more about the follies of federal granting, see Federal Aid to the States.

The IBD has an excellent front page summary of the 1990s roots to the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disaster.

One issue IBD touches on is the ineffectiveness of the regulating agency OFHEO. OFHEO gave Fannie and Freddie a clean bill of health just last December.

One reason that having regulatory agencies is worse than having no suchagencies is the false sense of security provided to markets by such apparently off-base seals of approval.

The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — housed at the U.S. Dept. of Commerce because Dick Nixon wasn’t getting along with his own Secretary of the Interior — has determined that the decline in the harvest of Chesapeake Bay blue crabs is a “commercial fishery failure.”  With that declaration by the “stewards” of the nation’s fisheries, Chesapeake crab fishermen are looking at a bailout (popular word these days) of up to 15 million taxpayer dollars over the next three years.

The Examiner reports that Maryland Watermen’s Association President Larry Simns and his members were “elated.”  Go figure.  Simns says that this is not a handout because the money would be used to put the crabbers to work restoring fisheries, planting trees, etc.  Perhaps they can staff the exhibits at the NOAA-partnered Smithsonian Institution’s “Ocean Hall” opening this weekend too.

What kind of message does this latest government intervention send to other commercial fishermen?  Overfish, deplete your source of income, and the taxpayer will numb your pain.  Of course, NOAA bureaucrats will then cite resulting fishery depletions as justification for a budget increase.  Big Government 101.

Govexec.com reports that one-third of recently surveyed federal managers believe “government misuses taxpayer dollars.”  While I applaud this bunch for their honesty, I’m stupefied that any federal manager would say otherwise.  One need only peruse the morning news to see that Uncle Sam’s spawn fritter away taxpayer dollars incessantly.  (I wonder how a manager at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service would vote.)  Even more disturbing, a survey of the general public conducted by the same outfit found that only 42% of respondents believe government wastes money.  (I’m holding out hope this survey was conducted in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.)

The Congressional Budget Office released new figures on the federal budget yesterday, which show that the deficit will peak in 2009 at $438 billion and decline thereafter. But budget watchers and CBO economists know that these “baseline” projections don’t describe actual budget realities.

So I constructed a “business as usual” scenario for revenues and spending to get a sense of the fiscal picture that the next president will actually face. The figure illustrates that it will be much easier being the president who enters office in 2009 than the one who enters office in 2013.

The revenue line in the figure assumes that all current tax cuts are extended and the alternative minimum tax is indexed for inflation. Extended tax cuts include income tax rates, dividends, capital gains, child credit, death tax, expiring business breaks, and other items.

The spending line assumes that discretionary spending rises as fast as GDP, the number of troops in Iraq and Afganistan is reduced to 30,000 by 2011, and Medicare payments to physicians are not cut back after 2010 as under the baseline. These adjustments are based on CBO data. I also estimate the extra federal interest costs of these assumptions.

Newly released data show that federal employee wages and benefits continue a rapid ascent above and beyond private sector pay levels. The data was released last week by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. (See tables 6.2, 6.3, 6.5, and 6.6).

The new data show that the 1.8 million federal civilian workers earned an average wage of $77,143 in 2007, which is 61 percent higher than the $48,035 average in the U.S. private sector. That 61 percent pay advantage has increased from a 34 percent advantage in 2000.

Looking at total compensation (wages plus benefits), federal workers earned an average $116,450 in 2007, which is more than double the $57,615 private sector average. The federal compensation advantage increased from 68 percent in 2000 to 102 percent today. Federal workers not only earn much more than private sector workers, their earnings advantage is getting more pronounced every year.

Federal compensation rose quickly during the 1990s, but even faster during the 2000s. I call this the “Bush Bounce” because it appears that the Bush administration has caved into federal union demands for expanded pay year after year. Between 2000 and 2007, average federal compensation increased at an annual average rate of 6.3 percent, which compares to the private sector increase of 3.5 percent. During the 1990s, average federal worker compensation increased at an average rate of 5.1 percent. The charts below illustate the “blast off” in federal wages and compensation.