Eideard

Years before Washington spent $787 billion on a national stimulus bill, it staged an unintended trial run in Louisiana, a huge injection of some $51 billion for which historians find few, if any, precedents in a single state.

The experiment is still playing out, but some indicators suggest that what occurred in Louisiana — dumping a large amount of reconstruction money into a confined space in the three and a half years since Hurricane Katrina — has had a positive outcome. The state’s unemployment rate of 5.7 percent in February was considerably below the national average of 8.1 percent, and it was the only state to see a drop in unemployment from December to January. It was also the only state with an increase in non-farm employment in February.

State economists specifically mention what one called “the ongoing building boom” from federal dollars as a main reason for the numbers. Largely a result of the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, construction projects have not dried up as they have elsewhere, and a few can even be seen in downtown New Orleans…

However, the state’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, has positioned himself as a leading voice against the new stimulus bill, objecting to federal intervention in a state’s economy. He has threatened to reject $98 million in stimulus money intended to help Louisiana’s unemployed, echoing other Southern and Western governors who have turned such rejections into a conservative rallying cry.

In Louisiana, however, the consequences have hardly been dire — just the opposite, in fact. One of the governor’s leading aides, the state’s recovery director, Paul Rainwater, praised the federal relief effort in Louisiana in recent remarks to Congress, the day after his boss scorned federal help on national television in the Republican Party’s response to President Obama’s first address to Congress…

In the preceding 18 months, some $25 million a week had been given out in the public-assistance program, which helps local governments rebuild vital facilities, among other functions…

Because of that history, the governor’s anti-stimulus stance — as well as his threat to reject the stimulus package’s supplemental unemployment aid as an unwarranted burden on business interests — has provoked some skepticism and incomprehension here.

At the grassroots level, the prime complaint is that the money isn’t coming fast enough to help people resume their old lives. A quality of life question equally common to the nationwide recession.

When the last of the neocon dinosaurs disappears, we might even finish convincing the Democrats that remain to leave the traditional [that means "corrupt"] way of doing business in government altogether.