Another teachable moment, courtesy porkulus

Last week, the San Diego U-T decided to highlight one of the first of the stimulus jobs to come to the San Diego area but in doing so, exposed the stimulus plan for being what it is not or at least, not as adverised.

Today, Montes and other employees of ABC Construction in Logan Heights will begin a three-week job overhauling taxiways at Gillespie Field in El Cajon.

The $1.4 million project is one of the first local initiatives started under the stimulus plan. It offers an early window into one way the government aims to help workaday Americans out of a deep and protracted recession.

The early window: A half a year after porkulus was signed into law, its apparent that it is not going to provide the “jolt” to the economy as we were told by the administration at the beginning of the year. It’s taken six months for the first of some of the stimulus money to reach the area in the form of a repaving job. And when the administration began the “jolt” walk back a couple of weeks ago and instead started the “long-range economic recovery” mantra, we were left scratching our head wondering how this squares with a job that lasts for 3 weeks.

Perhaps the six months it took for the money to be approved for this job was because the feds were checking the racial make-up of ABC.

And check this out:

The Obama administration directed a sizable share of stimulus money to bread-and-butter jobs like road repairs, bridge building and aviation improvements.

(italics, ours)

Depending on how you want to define the above work and depending upon who you listen to, there is probably between $30-$50 billion dollars going to the self-described bread-and-butter infrastructure jobs. So, the one aspect of porkulus where we threw up our hands and said, “O.K., at least there may be some long-term benefits to road/bridge building and repair", it amounts to between 3.8 and 6.4 percent of porkulus’ $787 billion dollar price tag.

Someone at the paper may want to rethink their idea of sizeable.