John Kerry`s Recycled Government Slush Fund Recipe

Sen.
John Kerry, D-Mass., has once again earned his
nickname:

Thurston B. Howell III. He`s elite, effete and so
hopelessly out of touch with reality that his latest
solution to America`s fiscal profligacy is … more
fiscal profligacy, of course,

Lovey! On Tuesday, Kerry introduced a $10 billion
infrastructure bank bill that would engineer yet another
federal taxpayer boondoggle benefiting Big Labor and
favored Big Business interests.

Kerry finagled support from Texas
GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, AFL-CIO brass

knuckler-in-chief Richard Trumka, statist U.S.
Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue, and the far-left
Center for American Progress. Like spinning straw into
gold, the Kerry coalition promises to leverage $10
billion in unidentified funds into $640 billion for
crumbling roads and bridges.

This new recipe for expansive
government is actually not a
"new" idea.
It`s an old recycled one borrowed from former
corruptocrat Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, who sponsored a
bill to create a federally operated

"infrastructure bank"
in 2007. President Obama tried to get $5
billion in funding for one in his 2010 budget, and $4
billion is proposed for one in his 2011 budget.

Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa
DeLauro is pushing a House version—and her lavish
pipe-dream plans tell you all you need to know about
what a disastrous, costly slush fund this thing would
inevitably morph into (TARP redux plus stimulus redux
plus Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac redux = abysmal failure
redux):

"The program, which would make loans much like the World Bank, would
finance projects with the potential to transform whole
regions, or even the national economy, the way the
interstate highway system and the first transcontinental
railway once did," The New York Times

reported last fall.
"In an interview,
Ms. DeLauro said she would be `looking at a broader
base,` meaning the bank would finance not just roads and
rails, but also telecommunications, water, drainage,
green energy and other large-scale works."

Green energy? Bright red flag. Like
Stimulus I, which was initially intended to put
infrastructure spending first but evolved into a
multipurpose slush fund that put infrastructure last,
the Kerry-Dodd-DeLauro-Obama
"infrastructure
bank" envisioned by progressives on Capitol Hill
would be plundered to finance
"green energy"
and "other
large-scale works" based on
"social benefits"
determined by a panel of cronies appointed by the
president.

The social justice infrastructure
"bank" would be anything but a bank in the normal sense of the word.
Ron Utt at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation

exposed the farce:
"This bank would
be capitalized by federal appropriations to leverage a
greater volume of debt borrowed under the full faith and
credit of the federal government. In turn the bank would
use these funds to finance eligible infrastructure
projects. While these proposed entities—and similar ones
that exist in the states from earlier legislation—are
described as `banks,` they are no such thing."

In other words: The infrastructure
banks would borrow more money the government doesn`t
have to dole out grants that wouldn`t be paid back and
don`t require interest payments. All`s well that ends
well in the land of make-believe austerity.

Unsurprisingly,

Big Labor biggie Andy Stern, former head of the
Service Employees International Union and

an Obama confidante, is glomming on to the
infrastructure bank idea to push a new overseas profit
tax on multinational corporations. Brilliant: Impose new
double-taxes on American businesses that no other
country imposes, reduce competitiveness, induce
companies to incorporate outside the U.S., and then put
union bosses in charge of redistributing the $30 billion
punitive windfall.

Supporters also compare the
infrastructure bank plan to the U.S. Export-Import
Bank—an idea that, as Washington Examiner reporter Tim
Carney

rightly notes,

"epitomizes corporate welfare. It also is a prime example of
unaccountability. The agency is independent of any
cabinet department, and it hands out loans and loan
guarantees basically at its own discretion. … (I)t`s
kind of like Fannie Mae was, before its exposure became
real and the taxpayers had to come in and bail it out.
So, Kerry wants to create Fannie Pave, and the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce loves the idea: a bunch of free
money that seems to cost nothing."

Who pays? Ordinary taxpayers,
nonunion contractors and businesses that don`t pander to
the Obama White House.

Remember: In his first weeks in
office, Obama signed

union-friendly executive order 13502, which
essentially forces contractors who bid on large-scale
public construction projects worth $25 million or more
to submit to union representation for their employees.
The project labor agreement racket requires contractors
to hand over exclusive bargaining control; to pay
inflated, above-market wages and benefits; and to fork
over dues money and pension funding to corrupt,
cash-starved labor organizations.

Higher taxes. Union favoritism.
Crony capitalism. Left-wing special interest wish list.
We`re on the road to another irreparable taxpayer
sinkhole. You can bank on that.

COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Michelle Malkin

[email
her]
is the author of

Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists,
Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our
Shores.
Click


here
for Peter Brimelow`s review. Click



here
for Michelle Malkin`s website. Michelle Malkin
is also author of


Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild
and the just-released
Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies.