PUBLIC CHOICE AT WORK. In an echo of the late Sen. William (D-Wisc.) Proxmire's Golden Fleece Awards, Senators McCain and Coburn identify eight North Carolina funded research projects as wasteful economic stimulus. The newspaper article notes much of the standard tension between what some people perceive as the obscure and recondite and what the researcher perceives as useful and meritorious. The issue, as Betsy's Page points out, is whether sponsored research, which ordinarily involves a competitition among research proposals called for by a specific government project, ought to be treated as economic stimulus.

Leave aside whether the federal government should be funding such studies in the first place. The real question is whether these projects were good targets for stimulating jobs. Of course they weren't. If they worthwhile they should have been funded out of regular funding for scientific grants. But there is no way that these projects belonged in a emergency stimulus that was supposed to fund jobs. They have nothing to do with jobs regardless of the graduate students who got some money out of them. The stimulus was sold to us as the plan that would provide jobs. But it never had anything to do with jobs. It was just to shovel out a whole bunch of money to a variety of projects sitting out there that hadn't been funded through the regular budgetary process. If someone got a job out of these projects, it was pure happenstance.

In another fifty years, a researcher might be able to estimate the multiplier of the stimulus project, and with some creativity, determine the extent to which that multiplier was reduced by the trading of favors, including relatively small expenditures on university research, in order to get the bill passed. (The exemption of Nebraska from certain expenditures to get the health reform passed is the same phenomenon, on a larger scale).