Answer to The Hill's "Big Question" today: Is rush to new spending evidence that the stimulus money has been wasted?

If you drove south from northern New Hampshire to North Carolina on I 95 as I have done this past weekend, you would see extensive work conspicuously done by women and men in lime green clothing here in the frozen north where almost no one lives. Every road has been resurfaced; the ledges have been torn off the high cliffs by the highways that just last year housed hawks and peregrine falcons, lines have been painted everywhere. Much of this work has been voted down again and again locally as work that did not need to be done, work that we did not want done; labor that we do not respect; work that we do not consider to be real work. Increasingly, the federales need to New Jersey-fy us so as to removeth chill of the cold, clear, northern night and the coyote’s chant that sends the willies up their spines. But there is less than 2% unemployment up here in these parts. This money is a complete waste by nostalgicos channeling the Inner Roosevelt and longing for the days of Woody Gunthrie and Big Bill Broonzy singing folkloric ditties in a box car heading across the western plains on the government’s tab. Commodities guru Jim Rogers, in comparing the Obama spending to that of the Chinese points out that the Chinese are correctly spending infrastructure money by applying it where it is needed for the 130 million new workers recently arrived in the industrial centers. Here it is just tossed anywhere, as if out of an airplane, regardless of need. All patterns of population and economy today point west. When people here in the Land of the Free move they tend to move today to Texas and Alaska. There has been no attempt to follow patterns of rising karma. And then when you get south to New York City, where employment is now most probably above 20% the roads and infrastructure are a mess and not a finger has been lifted. There appears to be no plan whatsoever as Rogers says.

Bernie Quigley
Haverhill, NH