This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 9, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The massive stimulus plan grinding through Congress contains tens of billions for education, but to what end?

Is it stimulus or just filling in budget holes for state education bureaucracies?

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom comments.

Well there's about $140 billion in it for education.

The biggest chunk of that is about 75 billion dollars that will go to states specifically for K-12 education to kind of do what they want with.

Then there's around 6 billion to increase Pell Grants for higher education.

There's about 13 billion to add to no child up behind.

There's about 15 billion for the discretionary use of the Secretary of Education, so there is a gigantic chunk of this stimulus

that is earmarked for education.

It's all supposed to be used in the first year or two after it's passed.

The problem always is they'll pass this,

and then in two years or three years,

they'll propose, well, we'll spend less money now and invariably the people on education

will say well this is going to be a huge cut because in previous years we got X amount and so

even if this was intended to be sunset at or stop when we have recovery, it won't because that's not how budgeting works. Budgeting works by special interests saying,

we used to get this, now you're trying to give us

less than this and we want this back and there's a perfect example in

education national science foundation which has lots of lobbying done by higher education for that.

They had their budget doubled between 1996 and 2006, roughly.

After that doubling, they didn't continue to get increases,

...