Monday, February 9, 2009

Testing for pork


If the stimulus package had no pork in it, projects and dollars would be allocated regardless of political party. In the regression above, we see a positive and statistically significant (p=10%) relationship between proposed spending per capita and the percent of Democrats in the congressional delegation. Methodology courtesy of Michael Ward:
I threw the state stimulus numbers into excel along with state population and state representation in the House. Lo and behold, you get a positive correlation between the fraction democratic in the state delegation and either that state's number of stimulus projects per 100,000 (rho = 0.13) or stimulus dollars per capita (rho = 0.24). Note that I omitted two outliers (Alabama's $ per capita was 10 times mean and New Hampshire had zero projects).

UPDATE: The projects are NOT yet in the stimulus bill; they are from a "wish list" of mayors.

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