By Steve Holland - Analysis
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Will spending $50 million to promote arts in the United States help stimulate the U.S. economy? How about $335 million to educate people about sexually transmitted diseases?
Those items and more form part of an $825 billion economic stimulus that may grow larger, creating a feeding frenzy in Congress as lawmakers seek to fund their wish lists.
On Wednesday night, stimulus legislation cleared the House of Representatives, where members hew more closely to party ideology than the Senate. The 244-188 vote was along party lines, with every Republican voting against the bill designed to fight the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he would seek to begin debate in the Senate on Monday. President Barack Obama wants the package approved by mid-February.
There are plenty of spending measures in the legislation aimed at directly helping generate economic growth and assisting people in need, from $275 billion in temporary tax cuts to $300 billion in assistance to the unemployed and to cash-strapped states reeling from the economic downturn.
But it is the litany of other, seemingly nonemergency items that is upsetting some stomachs on Capitol Hill, like the $15.6 billion in Pell grants for college students, $6 billion for modernizing college buildings, $600 million to buy new cars for government workers and $150 million in repairs to the Smithsonian Institution.
Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, a conservative, called the bill a huge mistake that he would vote against.
"I'm convinced that they (Democrats) are seizing this as an opportunity to fund programs to a degree that they could never have funded before simply by calling it a way to create jobs," he said.
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, has a letter of support for the bill from 146 economists, including five recipients of the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Democrats argue the legislation will do what it is intended to do -- give the economy a fast jolt.
"I can only tell you what the experts are telling us," said Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, "that somewhere around 70 percent of the spending will occur within the first 12 or 14 months. And that's stimulative."
DUELING ECONOMISTS
On the other hand, the libertarian Cato Institute has its own list of opposing economists, about 200 of them, who argued in a full-page newspaper advertisement that "it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today."
Ethan Siegal of The Washington Exchange, a private firm that tracks Congress for institutional investors, said the legislation first and foremost was about helping bail out the states.
