It’s very easy to describe most grants, whether foundation-funded or government-funded, as silly-sounding waste if you’re willing to use pejorative wording. And if like Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn you’re willing to combine that with widespread inaccuracy, then it’s easy to devise a list of 100 wasteful stimulus-funded projects.

Jared Bernstein, writing for the White House, observes that five of the allegedly wasteful stimulus projects aren’t ARRA-funded projects at all. It’s also easier to describe things as wasteful when you don’t describe them correctly:

Take for example an award that McCain and Coburn describe as “funding a WNBA Practice Facility,” when in fact the award is building a tribal government center that will create education and health facilities while also creating hundreds of jobs. Moreover, the tribe has agreed to disallow any commercial use of the facility.

In general, there are obviously a lot of unemployed people in this country who were previously working in the construction sector. That means doing construction projects now rather than later is a smart idea. But McCain and Coburn just seem to object, in general, to building stuff. For example, they reveal that the federal government gave $135 million in bond authority to the Vermont Economic Development Agency which, in turn, loaned $25 million to a ski resort to replace some lifts and buy new equipment. But what’s wrong with that? The money is going to be repaid. The government is facilitating the transfer of economic activity from the non-depressed future into the currently-depressed present, thereby alleviating economic misery.

Jon Chait observes that McCain & Coburn also seem to have decided that anything relating to animals is necessarily waste. Hence a small grant to fund research on cocaine addiction and relapse is turned into “Monkeys Getting High for Science.” Hardy-har-har. There’s a case to be made that the government has no role to play in funding scientific research, but it’s a mighty bad case. If you think the government should fund research in the health and medical fields then of course you’re going to be funding some experiments that involve monkeys. Even though monkeys are funny.

They also deploy some plain illogic. They go on and on about problems in the past with Pittsburgh’s North Shore Connector project which is going to extend the city’s light rail under the Allegheny River so it can serve the stadiums. They cite perhaps-persuasive evidence that the project has been mismanaged from the start, and arguably never should have been undertaken at all. That said, sunk costs in the past are irrelevant to whether or not a $65 million ARRA grant to finish the damn thing is a good idea. They also appear to object to the idea that this particular branch of the light rail will be for “entertainment” rather than for “commuters” but by this logic there should be no transportation to sports stadiums and movie theaters whatsoever. In the real world, of course, getting people to entertainment locales is a perfectly valid goal of transportation policy.

The whole list is full of nonsense like this. It’s true, of course, that if you don’t accept the underlying premise that it makes sense to engage in temporary spending boosts to counteract a downturn then you’ll discover that ARRA is full of not-totally-essential spending items. But counteracting the downturn is itself an essential government priority.

Ryan Avent blogs on the possible sources of the Texas Economic Miracle and concludes: “I think all of these factors contributed. Take a tech-oriented region like Greater Boston or the Bay Area, subtract out a housing collapse and add in an energy boom, and I suspect you’ve covered most of the discrepancy in performance.”

We'd be hearing more about the Boston Miracle if doing so advanced a low-tax, deregulatory agenda (cc photo by Renes)

I’d go stronger than this. If instead of comparing states you compare metropolitan areas, you sort of wonder where this miracle is. Here’s unemployment by metropolitan area. How’s Greater Boston doing? Well, they’re at 8.2 percent and faring better than Texas’ large Dallas and Houston metro areas. Indeed, Houston’s doing worse than Milwaukee, Seattle, Kansas City, and a bunch of other large cities I’ve never seen described as miraculous performers. The top-performing Texas metro area is the rather small Midland, TX which is still in worse shape than Madison or Honolulu or Omaha.

States, for better or for worse, aren’t real economic units. So state-level statistics often represent somewhat meaningless aggregation effects. Massachusetts happens to aggregate Boston (better than any large Texas metro) with a bunch of smaller metros (Worcester, Springfield, etc.) that are doing terribly. But it doesn’t make sense to say that Boston shows liberalism works while Springfield shows that it’s failed; Boston is just a very different kind of place.

The sensible thing to do about Social Security in 2010 and 2011 is to do nothing. At some future point it may become the case that projected Social Security deficits are a problem for economic growth, and that would be an excellent time to worry about them. But as Gallup confirms yet again politicians who feel mysteriously compelled to discuss this issue do have one policy option the public supports—soak the rich:

Representative Ted Deutch from Florida has introduced legislation to this effect though as I say, there’s really no need to do anything at this point. If we want better-educated citizens in 2040, we need to start improving schools right now. But our ability to pay pension benefits in 2040 will be determined by economic conditions in 2040, not by promises made or not made in 2010.