Porkulus Stimuli

Just What America Needs [Jonah Goldberg]

From a reader:

Good morning Jonah. I opened my copy of the Wilmington News Journal this morning to find this front page story about a particular type of job that is being created by the stimulus, namely that of traffic flaggers at road construction sites. Who knew that they needed special training? I await the commercials for the training school that will be showing up any day now during McHale's Navy reruns. Not quite the high tech green industry jobs that Obama has been touting, eh?

A couple things. Last month when I was in Alaska, the road from Fairbanks to Chena had what seemed to be nearly a dozen construction crews spread out doing mostly nothing. There was a flagger at each one, who'd keep cars waiting for the unnecessary pilot car to guide us. Without the pilot car, we'd alll presumably smash into parked steamrollers or something. One of the flaggers, who appeared drunk, got it wrong both times we encountered him on our roundtrip. It's a sign with only two settings, "slow" and "stop" and he beat the 50-50 odds both times and got it wrong. He could have used training.

More seriously, I got the sense that the whole scene was classic Alaskan porkonomics. Most of the workers we saw were doing nothing at all, save of course getting paid while slowing economically productive traffic and transportation. Somewhere in there, I can't help but think there's a metaphor for Obamanomics.