Last week I received word from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University of a study they did, and the results don’t surprise me. Mercatus Center scholars Veronique de Rugy and Jerry Brito researched a number of federal outlets to figure out that Congressional districts with Democrats are getting twice as much stimulus money as those represented by Republicans but the majority of money isn’t going to areas with the highest unemployment rates. Wait, wasn’t the stimulus supposed to put people back to work?
While the study itself is a tribute to how figures can lie and liars can figure, it also seems to me a contradiction in terms. Here’s why.
For decades, the political perception has been that Democrats are for the working man and Republicans for the rich. If you look at things this way, it makes some sense that Democrat-leaning districts get more funding as poor people tend to need more government assistance.
On the other hand, one would think that since the stimulus was supposed to keep unemployment under 8 percent that those districts which have chronic high unemployment would be those getting funding, and this study shows it’s not necessarily the case. Obviously if you happen to live under a Democrat Congressman in a high unemployment area the money should be rolling in, but apparently that’s not how the stimulus works.
In Washington circa 2009, it’s apparent that everything has become a political calculation. Yet I’d be willing to bet that if the GOP were in charge and Republican-leaning districts were shown to be getting the largest benefit from some government program the mainstream media would be blasting this study all over their newscasts. (Of course, if Republicans had been pressing for such a program they would be getting blame from both sides – the media would be excoriating them for being partisan and conservatives like me would have been angry for their proposing the big-government solution.)
But, just as we’ve seen in the health care debate, having the availability of federal goodies to hand out in order to help with re-election is always handy – it’s one extremely large pot of walking-around money and the best means of wealth redistribution socialists have yet found. Thus, I wouldn’t expect any change in the payout ratio as the 2010 election draws near and Democrats attempt to use every means at their disposal to maintain their grip on power in Washington.
