Just quickly, I'm noticing that a lot of my more conservative Facebook friends are expressing their pleasure at the fact that Governor Jindal has indicated his willingness to forego the federal stimulus funds allocated to Louisiana in the new bailout package. Granted, Jindal has predicated his position on an abundance of caution, wishing to evaluate the "strings" that may be attached to the funds. But my friends seem to be approving Jindal's move on the more general basis that they oppose Louisiana's acceptance of federal money in principal. (Check out the comments to this blog post from the Huffington Post, for instance).
All I want to say is that as a matter of course, the budgets of every state, including Louisiana, include significant injections of federal funds. Famously, Louisiana long resisted increasing the drinking age to 21, until the U.S. threatened to withhold federal money for highway construction and maintenance unless the drinking age was raised. Louisiana quickly fell in line after that.
Anyway, if you oppose states accepting federal money in principal, you can't start and end your criticism with the stimulus package. There are veins here that run deeper than that.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
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I agree and disagree. While it's fine to criticize people for being only against federal funding from the stimulus, I don't really think that's the reason. These same people might very well be against other federal funding, but because the stimulus is more recent, and more highly publicized, it should be expected that it would get more complaints. Personally, I have just as many complaints about the New Deal, but I've still been talking more about the recent stimulus.
ReplyDeleteMr Whatley's blog post left much to be desired. It's quite a stretch to claim that the state "desperately [needs] aid", and it's a further stretch to say that such desperate need would be significantly alleviated with the stimulus funds anyway. The reason it would be foolish not to accept aid, assuming there were no inexcusable strings attached, is because Louisiana taxpayers would hypothetically still be paying for the stimulus package even if the aid is refused. As long as you're paying through the nose anyway, you might as well accept the small concessions. You might still posture such a refusal in hopes of gathering the support of other states. If enough states were to refuse, it might be worth it.
I won't even try to defend HuffPo for that particular fluff piece. You're right, it's a bad piece of work. And yeah, Louisiana has been somewhat insulated from the mortgage collapse; someone once explained to me why this was, but I've forgotten.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure Whatley just thought back to the TV coverage of Katrina in asserting that Louisiana was in "desperate" need. It's the same unexamined assumption that led national journalists to make Beverly Hillbilly references when natural gas was discovered in the Haynesville Shale underneath DeSoto Parish. Nobody in the media really seems to know a damn thing about Louisiana.
My point is only that public goods are always going to be paid for out of public funds; as such, why should it matter to me whether those public funds come from out of the federal or the state treasury? The practical reality is that, while things in Louisiana may not be as bad as they are elsewhere, there are still plenty of infrastructure improvements that we need, and state dollars will not cover them.