RALEIGH – The porkulus bill enacted by Congress last week is one of the most expensive, dangerous, and injurious pieces of legislation in the history of the American republic.

I’d have voted against it.

When the borrowing costs are included, it will have a fiscal impact of well over $1 trillion. The federal budget deficit will soar as a percentage of gross domestic product (the proper measure) to levels not seen since the 1930s, virtually ensuring massive federal tax increase in the future and burdening the economy for years if not decades. No one who voted for it should ever have the gall to complain about Bush’s profligate spending again. And like its New Deal predecessor, the real intention of the bill is not to stimulate the economy in the short term but instead to expand federal power in the long term, making millions of additional Americans dependent on government handouts and thus on the reelection of the politicians who administer the handouts.

The porkulus bill is a reflection of outdated economic assumptions, secretive logrolling, and Left-wing contempt for most of the policy accomplishments of the past 30 years, from the pro-growth policy mix of the Reagan era to the bipartisan consensus on welfare reform, trade liberalization, and fiscal restraint of the Clinton era.

The very best reason for lawmakers of all stripes to have voted it down was that they couldn’t possibly have known its contents, given the lack of sufficient time to peruse the bill. No one who voted for it should ever have the gall to promise transparency or other good-government reforms. But what was known about the bill constituted more than enough justification for opposing it. Among many other things, it:

• Declares a new trade war. This truly is Herbert Hoover all over again. While much of the bill just shuffles cash from one pocket to another, doing little immediate good or harm, a wave of retaliatory protectionism would do great immediate harm.

• Rolls back key elements of welfare reform. The legislation “will add nearly $800 billion in new means-tested welfare spending over the next decade,” write Robert Rector and Katherine Bradley. “This new spending amounts to around $22,500 for every poor person in the U.S. The cost of the new welfare spending amounts, on average, to over $10,000 for each family paying income tax.”

• Vastly expands federal power over America’s health care sector, at great risk to liberty, service quality, and our pocketbooks.

• Vastly expands federal power over America’s education sector, at great risk to liberty, service quality, and our pocketbooks.

• Bails out state governments for their poor fiscal management, with disproportionate benefits flowing to California, New York, and a few other states. North Carolina taxpayers will be net payers into the bailout, not recipients of bailout cash. Don’t be fooled when the local news headlines suggest that the “federal government” is going to cover a chunk of North Carolina’s state budget gap. That is totally false. Every “federal” dollar the General Assembly appropriates is coming out of the pockets of current or future North Carolinians.

• Devotes most of its $300 billion or so in “tax cuts” on silly tax-credit gimmicks that don’t improve individual incentives to work, save, and invest, and instead attempt to boost the “economy” by encouraging debt-strapped consumers with no savings to borrow more, spend more, and save less.

• Spends very little (well less than a fifth of the total) on the kind of hard-hat infrastructure stimulus that was originally advertised, and the benefits of such investment at the federal level are exaggerated anyway. States should fund their own physical-capital investments, preferably with user fees, and reform the tax code to stop discouraging private investment. Federal involvement merely brings confusion, waste, delay, and excessive cost.

The porkulus bill is no gift to North Carolina. It puts the average North Carolina household in debt by another $30,000. It subverts both our state constitution and federal constitution. Every member of the North Carolina delegation who voted for the bill should be hanging his or her head in shame, not mugging for the cameras and mouthing meaningless platitudes about leadership.

Yeah, I think I would have voted against it, myself.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation