Behind the Lines: Dinosaurs at work

From The Salt Lake Tribune: An Op Ed : Behind the Lines: Dinosaurs at work
Welcome to Behind the Lines, a weekly conversation with Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist Pat Bagley and BYU economist Val Lambson.

GO TO THE ORIGINAL LINK TO SEE THE CARTOON - WHICH FEATURES A T-REX SKELETON HOLDIGN UP A "WELCOME BACK TOURIST$ SIGN" WHILE A SHORT MAN (HERBERT) SAYS "I REALLY HATE TO THANK DARWINISTS AND WOODROW WILSON AND OBAMA AND THE STIMULUS FOR BRINGING JOBS TO EASTERN UTAH, SO I WON'T.

Bagley: For the genesis of this week’s “Behind the Lines” cartoon I have to thank Tom Wharton. Tom wandered over from his Tribune “Outdoors” desk and shared his experience of attending the reopening of the quarry site in Dinosaur National Monument. The original quarry building was closed in 2006 when pieces of it began narrowly missing some of the more than 300,000 annual visitors who came to see the enclosed rock face holding thousands of dinosaur bones. There were no plans to rebuild. One of Utah’s premier tourist sites was off-limits until funds suddenly became available through the 2009 Obama stimulus.


Tom noted that Utah Gov. Gary Herbert never mentioned that fact in his speech at the reopening, though he played up the importance of the building to the local tourist economy. I give Herbert lumps in this cartoon, but he is merely doing what many other GOP politicians have done who were critical of The Stimulus. They complain loudly about how it doesn’t create jobs, then show up at the ribbon cutting to take credit for the jobs it created.

Lambson: I am as interested in dinosaurs as the next red-blooded American, and I am opposed to pieces of the quarry building falling on visitors. (This states the obvious, but we liberty-lovers get accused of so many things!) Your clever cartoon has a hidden metaphor, however. The notion that temporary stimulus packages create jobs on net is a dinosaur that should be extinct. Unfortunately, it is not and does a lot of damage while it thrashes around. The funds did not suddenly become available by magic; they came from somewhere else. People who push for government spending tend to have this in common: they emphasize benefits and underestimate or ignore costs. That’s how we got iProvo, light rail, and so on and on and on.