Almost difficult to believe that hubristically branded centralized economic control would end up with misallocated funds:

About $270 million in federal stimulus money awarded by the Federal Aviation Administration has gone to more than 90 airport projects that received low-priority ratings by the FAA, according to data by Subsidyscope, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts. The funds make up about a quarter of the $1.1 billion the FAA has granted to airports for shovel-ready projects from March through September this year... The FAA says its project priority-rating system is "the first evaluation factor" to categorize airport development but is just one of several tools in determining appropriate projects to fund.

Unless you're Paul "Greenspan Needs To Create A Housing Bubble" Krugman and you really believe the Keynes line about paying people to dig holes and cover them back up, outright waste is probably a negative for you. And the airport fiasco isn't the only transportation-related waste keeping the stimulus a miserable failure. There's also the minor issue of straightforward cheating going all the way back to March:

With the $215 million in federal stimulus funds Metro received (it could go up to $315) for transportation projects, they are giving cities a minimum of $500,000. But... cities were taking that money and trading it for as low as 62-cents to the dollar... one city would trade their $500,000 earmarked for shovel ready transit projects with another city for $315,000 in cash that they could use for anything they wanted... "That was a misunderstanding on somebody's part," Katz told the paper in a follow up story... But another board member, John Fasana, said that "the cities felt the latitude to do this, and Metro frankly was allowing it within the last week.

I won't spoil the ending but suffice to note that the phrase "didn't want some investigation to put any of the money at risk" makes an appearance. Eyes on the prize.

This isn't just a corruption issue. By the White House's own logic it's the kind of thing that ensures the stimulus's failure. That's why Obama banned states from paying off debt with their funds. Even if you buy the Keynesian logic underwriting the stimulus - which I might not but which Judge Posner does so what do I know - you need to have the money used for consumption. The fact that it hasn't been used for that consumption is, then, probably worth noting.

If nothing else, you certainly can't have stimulus cash getting outright devalued as soon as it hits the streets. That's almost like the opposite of a multiplier effect.

References and previously after the jump...