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Thank God we're a two-paper town, federal-stimulus edition

Both the big local dailies wrote about an IRS processing center in Andover over the weekend. See if you can guess which paper wrote which story:

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I wonder, sometimes, whether the Herald's reporters believe their own stories. Among the points omitted from the sensationalized coverage:

  • Consolidation: The renovated building may not increase the number of employees in the state, but it's expected to consolidate the current aging facilities in Methuen and Lowell. That's a major efficiency right there, generating an estimated savings of $6 million/annum - the entire cost of the project recouped in just 15 years.
  • Savings: The project has actually been scaled back from $120 million. So it's coming in well under budget. Isn't that a good thing?
  • Stimulus: The point of stimulus is not to create permanent government jobs, which would require an ongoing budgetary commitment. It's to have an immediate economic impact, in ways that generate longterm growth and help sustain particularly hard-hit economic sectors. This project is creating dozens of design jobs, and hundreds of construction jobs, almost all in the private sector. And its focus on green technologies will aid the commercialization of such work. That's not a flaw - it's the whole frickin' point.
  • Energy efficiency: It's unlikely that the energy savings will come close to paying for this project. But given that the consolidation of facilities that it will enable certainly will do that anyway, it's icing on the cake. Not only are such savings substantial, they're ongoing - upfront investment in the form of stimulus money we would have been spending anyway leads to a longterm reduction of government expense. That's great.

What I really, truly don't understand is the economic theory under which Coburn, McCain, and the Boston Herald seem to operate. Do they think, contrary to virtually all economists, that we should be reducing government spending during a downturn? The sort of spending they seem to love, renovating existing bridges, tunnels, and highways, is sometimes necessary, but achieves no longterm efficiencies. It creates short-term jobs. That's it. And it simply resets the cycle of maintenance, because all of that work will have to be done again in the future. And since the transportation infrastructure was already there, it doesn't create new opportunities, it just preserves what we already have. Channeling spending in a way that stimulates new economic sectors - areas like green construction - delivers precisely the same amount of economic stimulation in the short term, but also has salutary long term effects.

The IRS is easy to bash. But the truth is, it's an amazingly cost-effective bureaucracy. Its auditors earn back large multiples of their salaries for the federal coffers. Supporting their work, as at Andover, helps ensure that our system operates fairly, and that dodges and cheats don't stiff the rest of us with their portion of the tax bill. Why on earth would anyone oppose that?

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