Even reporters at the famously-liberal Los Angeles Times have soured on California’s $100 billion-plus rail boondoggle, whose cost will far outstrip whatever the state will get from the $800 billion stimulus package to build it.  But the paper’s editorial board, which supported the stimulus package, continues to back the project, which has ballooned in cost from $33 billion to over $100 billion.  (Managing to see the bright side of even the most pernicious government waste, the paper’s board cited other boondoggles with approval, like Boston’s disastrous Big Dig project, which resulted in motorist fatalities. It praised that infamous project for replacing “what used to be an expressway” with “a downtown park”, despite the fact that it caused “severe delays” for motorists and had a skyrocketing price tag of more than $15 billion.)

But as its own reporter, Steve Lopez, recently noted, there is no telling how much the project will ultimately cost, or when it will actually be completed:

The projected completion date has gone from 2020 to 2033. The anticipated cost has ballooned to as high as $117 billion, and no one seems to have a clue where the bulk of the money would come from. The state auditor and the state Legislative Analyst’s Office have raised serious concerns, and the rail authority’s own peer review group said the project represents “an immense financial risk” to the state. And two weeks ago, the railroad authority’s top executive resigned.To top it off, a poll last fall said nearly two-thirds of registered voters would run this train off the rails if they had a chance to vote again.

The rail project won’t even be useful or economically viable once it’s finished, since travelers will be able to travel more cheaply by road or air than by taking the train.  As syndicated columnist Amy Alkon notes, “this is a totally unnecessary train (and I say that as a train lover). It’s $59 from LA to SF on Southwest if you book in advance,” less than a train ticket will likely cost.  And although the project is misleadingly called a “high-speed” rail project, it turns out that “the train couldn’t really run high speed” after all.

As Tim Cavanaugh noted in Reason, the Los Angeles Times reporter, Steve Lopez, had

the good fortune to answer to the newsroom rather the opinion section, where bullet-train belief still reigns as supremely as it does in Gov. Jerry Brown’s rumpus room. The important thing is that one more prominent Golden State blowhard is sealing the case against the vacant and bankrupt high-speed rail project. . . . In a piece I missed earlier this month entitled “Keeping faith with California’s bullet train,” the ed board praised the High-Speed Rail project because it is similar to Boston’s notorious Big Dig and the building of the pyramids by slaves.

The Obama Administration still supports this boondoggle even though it has been criticized by other liberal newspapers like the Washington Post.  That paper, which has not endorsed a Republican for President since 1952, criticized the project in an editorial entitled “California’s High-Speed Rail System Is Going Nowhere Fast.”

As we noted earlier, the small fraction of the stimulus package that was earmarked for transportation was devoted disproportionately to laying the groundwork for wasteful “high-speed” rail boondoggles that are not actually “high” in speed. These multibillion dollar rail boondoogles would provide work at inflated wages for politically-powerful unions. But these projects are expensive white elephants that would be used by very few travelers at an enormous cost per mile, and not enable trains to go anywhere near as fast as they do in Europe, Japan, or China. (Other union-backed provisions in the stimulus package wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.)

Obama relied on exaggerated claims to push through the stimulus package, claiming it was needed to prevent an “irreversible decline” in the economy,  even though the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” Even an old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus might have been something that America could not afford at a time of record deficits. The Congressional Budget Office, ignoring various flaws in the stimulus package, argued that it would boost the economy in “the short run.” But even the CBO conceded that the stimulus would shrink economic output in “the long run” by increasing the national debt and thus crowding out private investment.

As a Bloomberg News commentary notes, large numbers of people who are not poor are getting food stamps, due to perverse incentives that encourage states to deliberately classify people as eligible in order to draw federal money to their state.  People are eligible in some states even if they are not poor at all, but merely received an “informational brochure” for welfare, or a tiny amount of state money that the state deliberately gave them that they didn’t even need, in order to qualify them for food stamps:

As the article notes, food stamp rolls have risen by 29 million people in recent years:

[A] troubling reason for the increase is that state governments have found it easy to get their constituents federal money — that is, money mostly raised from current and future taxpayers in other states — by making more people eligible for food stamps. According to a mid-2010 report from the Government Accountability Office, 35 states have no limit on the amount of assets a food-stamp recipient can possess. More and more states — the count was 36 at the time of the report — are providing “categorical eligibility” for food stamps to anyone who receives welfare services. Merely getting an informational brochure from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program counts as receiving a service.

Another way that states and localities can get federal money flowing to them is by providing token amounts of assistance with home heating bills. Even a dollar of energy subsidies can make someone eligible for food stamps, or increase the benefit level for someone already on SNAP. Vermont, for example, sends $5 checks to public-housing residents, even though their subsidized rent already covers heating, to qualify them for food stamps. Liberal activists call this strategy for getting federal money “heat and eat.”

The Obama administration didn’t create these perverse incentives, but it did magnify them (in legislation such as the $800 billion stimulus package, which largely repealed the 1996 welfare-reform law, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted). The Obama administration is busy cracking down on states that attempt to reduce food stamp fraud, as James Bovard noted in The Wall Street Journal. Food stamp fraud costs America billions of dollars. This is remarkable, since eligibility requirements are so lax that no fraud is even needed for many undeserving people to collect food stamps. As Bovard noted in the Journal, the Obama administration has encouraged states to abolish asset tests for food stamps, leaving even unemployed millionaires able to qualify: “Millionaires are now legally entitled to collect food stamps as long as they have little or no monthly income. Thirty-five states have abolished asset tests for most food-stamp recipients. These and similar ‘paperwork reduction’ reforms advocated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) are turning the food-stamp program into a magnet for abuses and absurdities.” There are now a record 47 million people on food stamps.

As the Bloomberg article notes, some Republican lawmakers want able-bodied adult food stamp recipients “to abide by work requirements,” “but the Obama administration hasn’t been interested.”

If food stamp handouts were low in dollar value — just enough to avoid hunger — middle-class people who don’t need them wouldn’t find it worthwhile to apply for them. But food stamps are not stingy, which is why growing numbers of people who are in no danger of ever going hungry have applied for them, and now receive them. Recently, “The average food stamp benefit was $133.80 per person” — which is more than I spent on food as a bachelor — “and $283.65 per household”  — which is more than my family typically spends on food in a month.

Earlier, I wrote about how it is not difficult to live on a food stamps budget. The Washington Post ran a story in its health section about how various people, such as the chef for a law firm and a natural foods store owner, were able to live quite well on a food stamps budget. For example, Rick Hindle, executive chef for the Skadden, Arps law firm “showed recently that you don’t have to spend hours in the kitchen to prepare healthful food for $1 or less per meal.”

To divert attention from this fact, liberal groups have created something called the “Food Stamp Challenge.” This “challenge” is a misleading PR exercise where a wealthy liberal like a high-paid bureaucrat or congressman who is used to spending huge amounts on food, lives for a week on a food stamp budget and stupidly buys junk food (or nothing but bread or pasta) rather than cheaper nutritious foods (like potatoes) in order to falsely make it seem like it is hard to eat on a food stamps budget (even though, as Warren Kozak notes in the Wall Street Journal, hunger is virtually non-existent in America). The only thing this bogus “food stamp challenge” actually shows is that privileged people who eat out in restaurants all the time are often unaware of what nutritious foods are cheapest; or they stupidly think that cheap  nutritious foods, like baked potatoes, are unhealthy, or not as good as white bread or pasta, even though baked potatoes, unlike white bread or pasta, have all 8 essential amino acids, and lots of vitamins and minerals, like 40 percent of your day’s supply of vitamin C, potassium, and B vitamins. This ignorance about food is shared by the Obama administration:  So great is its nutritional ignorance that it banned white potatoes from the WIC program, even as it permitted food stamps to be used for sugary sodas, and used tax dollars to subsidize junk food and fatty and sugary foods.

Meanwhile, the cost of the food stamp program has exploded.  As Bovard pointed out, the costs of the food stamp program have more than doubled since 2007 to $77 billion from $33 billion even as fraud has soared:

Wisconsin food-stamp recipients routinely sell their benefit cards on Facebook . . . ‘nearly 2,000 recipients claimed they lost their card six or more times in 2010 and requested replacements.’ USDA rules require that lost cards be speedily replaced . . . Thirty percent of the inmates in the Polk County, Iowa, jail were collecting food stamps that were being sent to their non-jail mailing addresses in 2009 . . . The Obama administration is responding by cracking down on state governments’ antifraud measures. The administration is seeking to compel California, New York and Texas to cease requiring food-stamp applicants to provide finger images. The food-stamp poster boy of 2011 is 59-year-old Leroy Fick. After Mr. Fick won a $2 million lottery jackpot, the Michigan Department of Human Services ruled he could continue receiving food stamps . . . ‘the winnings were considered ‘assets’ [rather than income] and aren’t counted in determining food stamp eligibility.’

As Michael Tanner noted this weekend in The New York Post, “the current state of our union can be summed up in just two words: We’re broke.”  In his State of the Union address,

The president devoted just 189 words to the deficit and our growing national debt, but the fact is that once again this year we will borrow 32 cents out of every dollar we spend. Overall, our national debt now tops $15.2 trillion (with Congress raising the debt ceiling to $16.4 trillion last week). And that doesn’t count the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. Throw those in, and our total indebtedness exceeds $120 trillion.

That means that if one counts only the official national debt, every man, woman and child in America owes $48,700. Include the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, and every one of us is in debt to the tune of $189,000. . . measured as a percentage of [our economy,] our budget deficit is roughly a quarter larger than France’s. In fact, among European countries, only Greece and Ireland have larger deficits this year than we do.

The debt figures paint an even grimmer picture. If one includes all the unfunded liabilities of pension and health-care systems, Greece’s total debt equals 875% of its GDP. . .The United States, however, now owes 885% of GDP, more than any other industrialized country.

Rather than come to grips with America’s fiscal crisis, President Obama gave a State of the Union address littered with costly giveaways, and full of false claims about outsourcing and corporate taxes. (Ironically, for all his denunciations of outsourcing, Obama has spent billions of dollars on foreign “green energy” firms: “79 percent” of all green-jobs subsidies in the stimulus package “went to companies based overseas,” noted the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.)

Massive budget deficits and mushrooming entitlements increased the federal government’s long-term obligations by $4.2 trillion in 2011 — more than three times the $1.3 trillion official figure for the federal budget deficit, noted a Washington Post article. (Even the official budget deficit is more than eight times the size of the budget deficit back in 2007.) The Obama administration has run up the biggest budget deficits in history. Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which benefited public-employee unions, will actually shrink the size of the economy in the long run, the Congressional Budget Office says, although it temporarily pumped up employment among government-employees. (By contrast, two economists argue that it wiped out the jobs of a million private-sector employees by diverting money from the private sector to the public sector.) Congress recently failed to block the Obama Administration from raising the national debt ceiling by another $1.2 trillion.

“After spending $55 million of a $118.5 million grant from” the U.S. “Department of Energy, Ener1, an Indianapolis-based maker of batteries,” has just “declared bankruptcy.”

The White House had enthusiastically touted the company, which gave rise to an embarrassing gaffe by Vice President Biden:

Vice President Biden visited Ener1 one year ago, January 26, 2011. . .On several occasions, Biden called the company “Enron one” during his visit, invoking a seemingly unintentional but ultimately prescient reference to the collapse of the energy giant Enron. The company was also ranked number 67 in the White House Report: 100 Recovery Projects that are Changing America.

To some, the bankrupt firm is a “candidate in the increasingly competitive race to become the Next Solyndra.” But in reality, several other recipients of green-jobs subsidies under the stimulus package have already gone broke. CBS News had earlier reported that there were 11 Solyndras — that is, financially-troubled recipients of green-jobs subsidies, five of which had already filed for bankruptcy. After the CBS News report, Evergreen Energy, another green-jobs recipient, filed for bankruptcy.

President Obama touted similar green-jobs boondoggles in his 2012 State of the Union address. In his 2010 State of the Union, the president touted Solyndra, which went bankrupt a year later after receiving $535 million from taxpayers. As Rep. Cliff Stearns noted:

Only two days after President Obama highlighted federal investments in high-tech batteries in his State of the Union address, Ener1 joined Solyndra, Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, SpecrtaWatt, and AES in bankruptcy – all recipients of taxpayer dollars.  We have a national debt exceeding $15 trillion, and the Administration is borrowing money from China to waste on subsidies for companies that are not viable.

As The Washington Post noted, energy programs have been “infused with politics at every level” during the Obama administration. It hastily approved subsidies for Solyndra, whose executives are now pleading the 5th Amendment, despite obvious danger signs and warnings about the company’s likely collapse. (Later, federal officials successfully pressured Solyndra to delay its announcement about upcoming layoffs until just after the 2010 election, to avoid embarrassing the Obama administration.)

The Obama administration has used green-jobs money from the stimulus package to outsource American jobs to countries like China: “Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.” As the Investigative Reporting Workshop noted, “79 percent” of all green-jobs funding “went to companies based overseas . . . In fact, the largest grant made under the program so far, a $178 million payment on Dec. 29, went to Babcock & Brown, a bankrupt Australian company.” This just one of many ways in which the Obama administration has used taxpayer money to outsource American jobs to foreign countries.

President Obama has spent billions of dollars in taxpayer money on subsidizing foreign firms through his failed “green energy” programs, so it was ironic and hypocritical when he attacked outsourcing in his State of the Union address. As former congressional economist Chris Edwards notes, Obama made many blatantly false claims about outsourcing and corporate taxation in his speech. Here are just a few:

Claim: “Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas.”

False: There are no such breaks. Instead, we punish U.S. and foreign businesses for investing and creating jobs here.

Claim: “If you’re a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn’t get a tax deduction for doing it.”

False: There is no such tax deduction. . .

Claim: “From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax.”

False: We’ve already got a corporate “alternative minimum tax,” and it’s an idiotic waste of accounting resources that ought to be repealed.

Claim: “It is time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas.”

False: We penalize them for locating jobs here. Besides, the overseas operations of U.S. companies generally complement domestic jobs by boosting U.S. exports.

Claim: “Companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world.”

True: Our rate is 40 percent, which compares to the global average rate of just 23 percent.

The irony of the president’s claims is that he himself is the Outsourcer-in-Chief and King of Outsourcing, given how many jobs have been — and will be — driven out of America thanks to government subsidies in the $800 billion stimulus package that were given to foreign firms (like a bankrupt Australian company), and Obama administration financial regulations that effectively discriminate against American companies in favor of overseas firms, and impose billions in new costs on American manufacturers. American manufacturers face a growing mountain of red tape that has caused layoffs among medical device manufacturers, and 4,300 employees of an insurance company were recently laid off due to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law backed by the Obama administration. The Dodd-Frank law is also expected to drive well-paying proprietary-trading jobs overseas to Europe. The Obama administration has also imposed harmful and costly labor and employment regulations on American manufacturers.

Weirdly enough, President Obama supports taxpayer-subsidized outsourcing by companies headed by his political supporters (like GE), even while criticizing non-subsidized (free-market-based) outsourcing, which — unlike taxpayer-subsidized outsourcing — can actually save American jobs by reducing the cost of finished goods sold by American companies. (A struggling firm’s decisions to outsource some functions can actually save American jobs in the long run. An American manufacturer of a finished product, facing stiff cost competition from overseas manufacturers, can reduce its overall costs, and thus avoid going out of business, by outsourcing low-skill jobs producing crude components of the finished product to low-wage overseas workers, thus enabling the more valuable finished product designed or assembled by skilled American workers to be cost-competitive with finished goods produced entirely overseas.)

The Associated Press evaluates some of Obama’s claims in “Fact Check: Obama Pushes Plans That Flopped Before.”

My take on President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address is at this link. It discusses one of the jobs proposals he will reportedly make this evening.

Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron argued that the $800 billion stimulus package wasn’t even designed to stimulate the economy, but rather to benefit special-interest groups, since it flunked even old-fashioned Keynesian policy prescriptions about how to revive the economy. Recently-disclosed memos obtained by the New Yorker provide more evidence for this argument: “over the objection of his economic advisors, President Obama replaced $60 billion of ‘highly stimulative spending’ with a slow-spending but ‘inspiring’ $20 billion for high-speed trains and $40 billion in pork for his Senate Democratic allies. And this is starting from a point at which he knew that his advisors thought that not more than $225 billion of the $826 billion total was high-quality, fast-spending, efficient stimulus.”

This is not the only way that Obama ignored economics in favor of politics when drawing up the stimulus. Originally, economists wanted the stimulus to include the kinds of transportation spending that could boost the economy. But the stimulus package was purged of most investments in roads and bridges, and filled instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that fixing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women. Christina Hoff Sommers points out that “of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men,” because men “predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors.” But when some administration officials floated the concept of “an ambitious . . . stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges,” and infrastructure as a way of “reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy,” “Women’s groups were appalled,” denouncing “The Macho Stimulus Plan.”  The Obama administration quickly knuckled under to this pressure, resulting in a “stimulus” package that spent money instead on social services like welfare that are administered mostly by female employees.  As an AP story noted “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.” (The stimulus package largely repealed welfare reform).

The little “transportation” spending that remained in the stimulus package was disproportionately wasted on laying the groundwork for “high-speed” rail boondoggles that are not actually “high” in speed. These multibillion dollar rail boondoogles would provide work at inflated wages for politically-powerful unions. But these projects are expensive white elephants that would be used by very few travelers at an enormous cost per mile, and not enable trains to go anywhere near as fast as they do in Europe, Japan, or China. (Other union-backed provisions in the stimulus package wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.)

Similarly, the “green jobs” Obama promised in the stimulus package never came into being, as even The New York Times has conceded. Instead, the stimulus package’s green-jobs spending ended up inadvertently outsourcing American jobs to China. The administration’s green-energy programs also wiped out jobs in the furniture industry.

Obama relied on exaggerated claims to push through the stimulus package, claiming it was needed to prevent an “irreversible decline” in the economy,  even though the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” Even an old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus might have been something that America could not afford at a time of record deficits. The Congressional Budget Office, ignoring the above flaws in the stimulus package, argued that it would boost the economy in “the short run.” But even the CBO conceded that the stimulus would shrink economic output in “the long run” by increasing the national debt and thus crowding out private investment.

President Obama formally notified Congress on Thursday of his intent to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion. Congress will have 15 days to say no before the nation’s debt ceiling automatically is raised from $15.2 trillion to $16.4 trillion.

The debt ceiling would not need to be raised to this level if Obama had simply lived up to his 2008 claim that he would cut spending if elected. Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise of a “net spending cut,” but soon after taking office, he proposed budgets that would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt. Federal spending is at record levels, and the Obama administration has run up the biggest budget deficits in history. “President Obama’s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt,” the Congressional Budget Office said in 2010. That’s many times the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars combined.

The Congressional Budget Office reported last Spring that Obama understated budget deficits “by more than $2.3 trillion over the upcoming decade.” Obama objected to even a tiny two percent cut in the federal budget sought by Republicans, submitting a self-indulgent, smoke-and-mirrors budget that would actually increase spending even faster than previously proposed for 2012.

If you are displeased by the Obama administration’s record spending, and being deceived by Obama, that is apparently a sign that you are dumb, according to liberal “mainstream” media organs like Newsweek. Newsweek this week features a lengthy article by Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan entitled, “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb.” (Law professor Ann Althouse, who voted for Obama but has been critical of Obama’s broken promises and record in office, responds to Newsweek‘s gratuitiously insulting article here.)

Sullivan has been a big booster of Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, even though the stimulus package will actually shrink the size of the economy “in the long run,” according to the Congressional Budget Office. The stimulus package contained green-energy subsidies that were used to shift American jobs to countries like China, since 79 percent of those subsidies went to foreign firms. The Obama administration has also destroyed thousands of jobs through the burdensome red tape, restrictions, and costs imposed by Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” law, and by using federal agencies to attack merit-based hiring by private employers.

One of the few virtues of the federal government has been its inefficiency. With functions spread out across different agencies and duplicated powers and responsibilities, it has often proved unable to harm the economy as much as it could owing to power games and competition among agencies. Now the president wants to change all that. He wants a ruthlessly efficient government to intrude in all aspects of our lives without internal checks and balances. An efficient government might have been a good thing 30 years ago, when the government was spending much less per person. Now that it’s spending over $30,000 per household, the prospect is terrifying.

Take, for example, the proposal to transfer the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the Department of Commerce to the Interior Department. It’s clear that President Obama wants to create a European-style Department of the Environment. The merger gives the environmental lobby a one-stop shop for everything outside the EPA. It also creates a powerful behemoth that will be all-too-ready to trample property rights in the name of the environment. The Interior secretary and the EPA administrator will form a powerful alliance in the president’s cabinet, and the chances of protecting the environment through responsible stewardship and free market methods will be significantly diminished as this new bureaucracy expands its power.

Meanwhile, the proposed merger of the subsidies arm of the Commerce Department with such entities as the U.S. Trade Representative, the Small Business Administration, the Export-Import Bank, and other market-complicating agencies creates what one commentator called “a corporate welfare Voltron.” The whole purpose of this department will be to interfere with the free enterprise system to the benefit of the political flavors of the month. Rent-seekers across the country will delight that the process of diverting taxpayer money into their pockets will become simpler and easier. That may be efficient, but is is not responsible government.

How will the president achieve this radical transformation of his power base? The truth is that he can’t do it himself. The Congress removed reorganizational power from the president in 1984. The authority to create his own departments, secretaries, and agencies without congressional approval is how we ended up with the separate Departments of Education and Health and Human Services under Carter, and Veterans Affairs under Reagan. People often forget that there was no congressional action to create the EPA. It was created by a reorganization under President Nixon. In fact, during the period in which the president had the authority to create (or consolidate) departments and agencies, their numbers increased in greater amounts than in any other period in American history, including the Progressive era.

The one saving grace is that the power is self-defeating. The more authority the president has over executive branch organization the greater the likelihood duplicate or unnecessary agencies will ultimately be created since every president wants to appear like he’s done something dramatic to help the economy. This president has already shown he’s no different than the rest. Congress should reject his request.

People who really want to reform the federal bureaucracy can examine the presentations at this years’ Hillsdale Free Market Forum, where Charles Murray told us why we didn’t need an Education Department, Jerry Taylor blew away the rationale for an Energy Department, and I examined just how we could abolish the Commerce Department.

The State of Maryland spends millions of Medicaid dollars on dead people, “about half of it from the federal government,” notes The Washington Examiner. Maryland officials ignored information in a federal Social Security database, and even information in their own computers, in approving this spending. Of the millions in improper payments, “$426,403 in postmortem Medicaid benefits had been paid to just 10 deceased individuals, nine of whom were enrolled in managed care organizations. In one case, Medicaid payments to a nursing home began eleven months after the individual had died.”

As we noted yesterday, dead people also get food stamps, and fraud in food stamp programs costs taxpayers billions of dollars. “While many recipients had invalid Social Security numbers and were double-dipping between federal and state programs, many of the recipients also happened to be dead. This has become a pervasive problem in the realm of government benefits. (The Social Security Administration also sends millions of dollars to recipients who are dead.)” As Jim Bovard noted in The Wall Street Journal, state attempts to prevent fraud in the food stamp program are being thwarted by the Obama administration: “The Obama administration is responding by cracking down on state governments’ antifraud measures.”

Obama’s stimulus package largely repealed welfare reform, encouraging states to make welfare payments to undeserving people. Much stimulus money has been wasted. It has gone to dead people and prisoners, wasteful welfare spending, abandoned bridges to nowhere, and unnecessary government buildings. The stimulus package subsidized foreign green jobs and wiped out jobs in our export sector. Small wonder that Harvard economist Robert Barro called it “the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s.”