Mississippi Hypocrisy

A $3.7 billion program that channels federal money to local communities for projects designed to improve blighted areas and help produce jobs has been in the Bush administration crosshairs almost from the day the administration took office. The Bushies never liked the Community Development Block Grant program, and has justified trying to kill it by rating it "ineffective." [1] But killing it outright has been a step too far for even some Republicans on Capitol Hill, who have seen it as at least a convenient channel for pork-barrel spending in their districts and have thus helped Democrats keep it on life support.

So, unable to kill it—it is expected to get about $3 billion in fiscal 2008, down from $4 billion two years ago—the Office of Management and Budget keeps railing about how funds ought to be better targeted at its ostensible mission, which is to give a boost to poor communities where the free market isn't spreading the wealth on its own.

It's in that context that a news story in the Friday edition of The New York Times [2] should make people furious:

Like the other Gulf Coast states battered by Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi was required by Congress to spend half of its billions in federal grant money to help low-income citizens trying to recover from the storm.

But so far, the state has spent $1.7 billion in federal money on programs that have mostly benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. The money has gone to compensate many middle- and upper-income homeowners, to aid utility companies whose equipment was damaged and to prop up the state’s insurance system.

Just $167 million, or about 10 percent of the federal money, has been spent on programs dedicated to helping the poor, mostly through a smaller grant program for lower-income homeowners.

And while that total will certainly increase, Mississippi has set aside just 23 percent of its $5.5 billion grant money — $1.25 billion — for these programs. About 37 percent of the residents of the state’s coast are low income, according to federal figures.

Mississippi is the only state for which the Bush administration has waived the rule that 50 percent of its Community Development Block Grants be spent on low-income programs, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers the program. It is also the only state to ask for such waivers.

Let's see if we have this straight. The CDBG program gets a bad rap from the Bush administration because it "does not have a clear and unambiguous mission" and the program's spending formula "does not effectively target funds to the most needy communities." But when Mississippi seeks a waiver of the rules so that the money can be spent more ambiguously and with less effective targeting, the White House says, "Oh, sure."

But this is par for the course for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the former Republican National Committee chairman and corporate lobbyist. He exemplifies the e. coli conservatism credo [3] that government doesn't exist to serve the least of us, but it exists to serve cronies at the top, and if those at the bottom happen to get some crumbs, well, hey, thank the free market!

We've reported how this has worked throughout the whole Hurricane Katrina debacle [4] in the hands of conservative ideologues like Barbour. This is the kind of duplicity that ought to be highlighted continually over the coming months. An ideology that allows for such hypocrisy with the people's money deserves to be shunned from the political landscape.