Golden Fleece of Stimulation

A noted left-wing writer actually found a Democrat he disapproves of. Naturally, the target of his angst has been dead for four years.

Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wisc., famously gave out “Golden Fleece” awards for wasteful government spending throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps not too surprisingly, federal grants to colleges and universities regularly won the honors.

“One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award,” Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland remembers. “Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her ‘mountain climbing hobby.’”

“Actually, she’s one of the nation’s most distinguished anthropologists.” Perlstein, a fellow at the Center for American Progress, goes on to describe the scholarship that his mentor got a subsidy for: “She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work.” He cannot understand why taxpayers don’t enthuse over such projects.

“Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines,” Perlstein writes in the CAP Our Future Today news service. “But it was also numbingly reactionary.”

He tries to make a case for the grants that Sen. Proxmire publicized but cites a source so dubious that, the Chronicle of Higher Education has revealed, even professors are starting to question it. “According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes ‘went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs,’” Perlstein notes.

Sen. Proxmire’s awarding of the Golden Fleeces led to what the CAP sage laments as “the Clinton-era Democratic fetish for fiscal austerity.” Still and all, the CAP scholar rates the late senator as one of a group of “well-intentioned liberals” although Perlstein, as we see, has far less enthusiasm for what the lawmaker actually did.

We should note that, to his undying credit, Perlstein is one of the only journalists in America, left or right, who pointed to Communist China as the culprit a couple of years back when American products from pet food to pharmaceuticals were found to be tainted. Nevertheless, his take on the achievements of the Democrat who replaced Joe McCarthy in the U. S. Senate runs true to his ideological form.

Oddly, he finishes his essay by trying to evoke the solon’s name in an effort to get his readers to lobby for President Barack Obama’s stimulus package. This proposal is a trillion-dollar program that elites and key officeholders want to pass but which the people who actually pay for it revile.

“Tell the operator you need to speak with your senator,” Perlstein urges. “Tell them to pass some stimulus, and refuse all bad-faith conservative amendments.”

“Even William Proxmire would be proud.” Perlstein is nearly apoplectic at the public reaction to the stimulus bill in Congress that gets more expensive by the day as senators and representatives add favorite projects to it that some observers label pork.

“Now a public perfectly conditioned to believe increased government spending is some kind of evil in and of itself floods senators will calls running 100 to 1 in favor of doing nothing [italics Perlstein’s] in the face of an imminent depression,” Perlstein writes. “Who’s been fleeced?”

“We have.” Actually, at the risk of doing some mindreading, particularly of the dead, were he alive, Sen. Proxmire might have awarded a great big Golden Fleece to the entire legislative package that Perlstein and his friends are so enamored of.

As it happens, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the stimulus bill, if passed, will drive the Gross Domestic Product down.
“In contrast to its positive near-term macroeconomic effects, the Senate legislation would reduce output slightly in the long run, CBO estimates, as would other similar proposals,” the budget research arm of the U. S. Congress noted on its official blog. “The principal channel for this effect is that the legislation would result in an increase in government debt.”

“To the extent that people hold their wealth in the form of government bonds rather than in a form that can be used to finance private investment, the increased government debt would tend to ‘crowd out’ private investment—thus reducing the stock of private capital and the long-term potential output of the economy.”

This is even more ominous that the Vice President’s “loin-girding” warning on the campaign trail last year. The CBO has been run by Democrats even when the U. S. Congress was nominally under Republican control.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.