My worry with Obama's planned environmentally-friendly infrastructure projects has been that it will another case of failed industrial policy: the government trying to artificially prop up programs that are not viable in the market, instead of helping entrepreneurs produce what is efficient.
Today's Washington Post story on the internal debate going on about the stimulus bill makes me more concerned:
But the green-collar proposals have also come under fire. Hill, the incoming Blue Dog co-chairman, said he opposes including these proposals and the medical technology project in the stimulus plan, suggesting that "somewhere down the road" they be considered under the normal legislative process.
How can we properly debate whether or not these spending projects are "green" boondoggles if they are buried in a bill that will be probably be hundreds of pages long?
I bring up the Patriot Act not to suggest that Obama is trying to take away our civil liberties through his stimulus spending. Instead, we should look to the Patriot Act as an example of when some proposals were snuck into a much larger bill, and then created costs down the road because they were not given enough consideration. Let's have the "green-collar" debate be fully transparent. That can't happen if the policies are hidden in a massive stimulus bill that will be rushed through Congress.
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Mark of TX 10:14AM March 07, 2009
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