…in why government is a lousy vehicle for choosing economic investments.  LA Times

A few days before signing the stimulus bill, Obama said in his weekly radio address that the money would underwrite “the work of building wind turbines and solar panels and the smart grid necessary to transport the clean energy they create; and laying broadband Internet lines to connect rural homes, schools and businesses to the information superhighway.”

Not all of the money is heading toward such purposes. Local governments have their own ideas on how it should be spent. And some are making choices that may be at odds with Obama’s vision.

In Minneapolis, the City Council voted recently to spend $2 million in stimulus funds on a vacant 99-year-old theater that developers want to convert into a center for dance. The project would create about 48 permanent jobs, city documents indicate.

In the competition for the limited stimulus money, the council awarded less than $300,000 to a company that wants to open a solar-energy-panel manufacturing plant that would create 360 jobs by 2011, according to city records.

Because the solar plant didn’t get more funding, its chief executive officer, Joel Cannon, said he wouldn’t be able to open the plant in Minneapolis.

A private company would not have the luxury of making such a stupid allocation of resources — it would go out of business. Government never goes out of business regardless of how stupidly it behaves.

So we witness the federal government stupidly borrowing trillions of dollars to inefficiently fund “investments” that our leaders think are just peachy keen.

Hope. Change.