Pork is Good for You

(My apologies to those with religious dietary restrictions...and to those who hate the letter P)

Greg Mankiw's hypothetical alliterative stimulus critic worries that the stimulus package will be "pointless, political, and pork-filled." Perhaps. But it's hard for this person to perceive how a proposal that is political and pork-filled would be probably, or even possibly, pointless. To prefigure my point, perforce, the politicians and pork-purveyors must have had a point in preparing to pass the purported pork-proliferating package. Otherwise, why pother...um, I mean, why bother?

All alliteration aside (but apparently now actively assonant), the general purpose of stimulus packages is to mobilize the economy's unused resources, and, in this particular case, to (sorry, I can't help it) prevent prices from plummeting. Does the presence of pork in a package (really, I'm sorry, but I give up) in any way hinder the pursuit of such purposes? As far as the deflation issue is concerned, useless projects are precisely the place we should be putting our power. Useful projects will augment aggregate supply and thus push against the attempt to arrest falling prices. Instead of one bridge to Nowhere, let's have two! Just so the builders of those bridges can use up labor and make it harder for others to hire, thus halting the hemorrhage of wages and helping stabilize the price level.

My other point is that, in any case, pork projects actually will be useful to someone. Somebody wants to drive to Nowhere, and that's why they want to have the bridge built. It might be pointless to divert resources toward such projects when the economy is already using most of its resources, but today (and in a few months, when there will be even more slack resources), the pointless thing would be to let those resources be wasted. Pork may not be the best use of those resources, but it's better than nothing.

And there is also the secondary effect, the Keynesian multiplier. The people hired to build bridges to Nowhere will spend some of their new wages on things that they want. When those things are produced, the resources involved are clearly being put to good use, because they create something that somebody wants and is willing to pay for.

So, to push the parlance of this passage past the point that people can put up with prior to puking, as the penultimate paragraph presages, there is plenty of point to pork-barrel politics when it comes to the passage of programs to prop up our pained pecuniary polity and positively impact its per capita product and probable performance.