Our friend Perri Morgan at Capitol Monitor in Raleigh has been hard at work creating a handy tool for tracking federal “stimulus” spending in North Carolina. Check out the result: the NC Stimulus Watch site.

I’ll periodically post some of the data about Southeastern NC. Let’s begin with Brunswick County.

Stimulus Watch currently counts just over $20 million in federal aid sent into Brunswick so far. This includes $6.3 million for transportation improvements, $5.2 million for local public schools, $8.6 million for water projects, and a couple of smaller grants.

What really becomes obvious when you scan the list of projects is that, if you didn’t realize it already, the federal “stimulus” bill was largely a borrowing binge on behalf of state and local governments that could not otherwise issue debt to paper over their fiscal deficits. Much of the spending consists of routine government expenses for which there is little realistic prospect of creating new jobs. Did the bailout “save” some government jobs? Probably. But if state and local government is larger and more costly than state and local revenues can finance, it does no one any favors to issue federal debt to maintain the status quo. That just kicks the can further down the road.

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