Classic Obama subterfuge from the President-elect on This Week this Sunday.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you about, because like one of the signature proposals already is this Museum of Organized Crime out in Las Vegas. I had Mitch McConnell out on the show last week and he ridiculed it, saying that, you know, this is an example of the kind of pork we don’t want.
Yet its advocates say, wait a second, it’s a construction project, it’s ready to go, it’s going to create jobs. Is that the kind of project that you want to fund or not?
OBAMA: Well, let’s be clear, that was a project that was proposed as part of the mayors’ project. The country’s mayors put together — here are a range of projects we can do, we didn’t include that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But would you want to fund it or not?
OBAMA: Well, I think that what we have to do is evaluate whether or not these are projects that, as I said, are going to provide long-term benefits to the economy. You know, I would prefer spending money on things like making sure that all federal buildings are energy efficient so the taxpayers are saving money over the long-term.
I want to make sure that on health care we are creating the infrastructure that can make our health care more — system more efficient. So, you know, we want to spend the money wisely. We want to spend it prudently.
In a package of this magnitude, will there end up being certain projects that potentially don’t meet that criteria of helping on health care, energy, or education? Certainly.
But what we don’t want is this thing to be a Christmas tree loaded up with a whole bunch of pet projects that people have for their local communities.
So will Obama fund the mob museum or not? Read it again. Read it three times. Give up? Don’t worry, it’s not just you. He never answers the question. And he can’t. Because there are thousands of mob museums, bike paths, water slides and other ‘shovel ready’ projects of dubious value being pushed on Congress. There is simply no way possible that objective cost benefit analysis can be completed on any of them in time to stimulate the economy. Sure, each and every one of these projects will have some fantasy study claiming to prove it is worth the cost. After all every publicly financed sports stadium manages to come up with these same fantasy numbers. And the same is true for pretty much all publicly financed entertainment infrastructure.
So since no objective cost benefit analysis will be done, all of Obama’s spending will just be spending for spending’s sake. We might as well be paying people to dig ditches and then fill them back up. And at a trillion dollars, that’s a lot of ditches.
