Stimulating Bureaucracy: The Stimulus’s Only Success
As if we need more evidence that government feeds off itself in enlarging its size and scope, the Obama administration plans to create a new government bureaucracy to be tasked with overseeing how stimulus money is spent by private contractors. While this measure to instill greater accountability of use of federal money may appear at first glance to be a good thing, it perversely institutionalizes (through the creation of a new oversight agency) that fiscal stimulus is indeed an effective principle and results in even more spending (in order to expand govt) than was first outlayed in the original stimulus package.
Instead of continuing to legitimize the stimulus and continuing to spend more money in the name of spending money “efficiently,” the administration ought to admit the stimulus’ failure (I’m not holding my breath though…), stop spending stimulus money or other money in order to spend stimulus money, and move on.