Last week I defended Republican governors from charges of hypocrisy for accepting federal funding even though they may have opposed the law that enabled the funding in the first place. Whether you oppose a program or not, once it’s passed into law and your state’s taxpayers are helping pay for it, you have both a right and an obligation to take advantage of it. Steve Benen comments:
But my concern isn’t just the hypocrisy of Republicans decrying spending bills and then trying to direct that spending to their states and districts. My beef has more to do with their ideology: these same Republicans insist public investments can’t create jobs and are bad for the economy, and then also say public investments can create jobs and are good for the economy.
And that’s a problem, not of hypocrisy necessarily, but of an incoherent approach to governing.
This is quite a different kettle of fish, and it is indeed a problem of hypocrisy. If you oppose a program, that’s fine. Maybe you just think it’s a poor use of taxpayer dollars. But Steve is right: at any particular point in time, federal programs either create jobs or they don’t. If you insist that they don’t, you can’t turn around and brag about all the jobs you brought to your state via federal roadbuilding projects. You can argue that you’re just getting back the money your state sent to Washington in the first place, but you can’t pretend that you suddenly believe that federal spending creates jobs after all just because the money is being spent in your own backyard.
