$300,000 for a GPS-equipped helicopter to hunt for radioactive rabbit droppings at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state.

Now there’s a sentence you never thought you’d read. Am I right? Of course I am.

That is one of the many examples compiled by the Washington Examiner of how the $787 billion (remember when that sounded like a lot of money?) “stimulus” bill, passed in February, was spent.

A few of my favorites from the list:

• $219,000 for Syracuse University to study the sex lives of freshmen women.

You have to pay somebody to do that?

• $2.3 million for the U.S. Forest Service to rear large numbers of arthropods, including the Asian longhorned beetle, the nun moth and the woolly adelgid.

Those are all invasive species. We’re trying to eradicate them. Thus, this is a double stimulus: job security for the Forest Service employees doing the “rearing,” and job security for the DNR folks trying to get rid of them.

• $356,000 for Indiana University to study childhood comprehension of foreign accents compared with native speech.

• $1.3 million on government arts jobs in Maine, including $30,000 for basket makers, $20,000 for storytelling and $12,500 for a music festival.

And:

• $300 apiece for thousands of signs at road construction sites across the country announcing that the projects are funded by stimulus money.

I love that one. Not only would those sign-makers not have that work without the stimulus, they wouldn’t have that work without the stimulus!

Now, before we all go getting all uptight and outraged and full of righteous indignation, let’s remember what the purpose of the “stimulus” bill was. To stimulate the economy, by pumping money in – money which would have a “multiplier effect,” and “create jobs.”

Or “create and save jobs,” maybe.

So. In theory, it doesn’t matter how stupid or superfluous some of the specific pork projects make-work stimulus efforts sound. For example:

• $3.4 million for a 13-foot tunnel for turtles and other wildlife attempting to cross U.S. 27 in Lake Jackson, Fla.

• $1.15 million to install a guardrail for a persistently dry lake bed in Guymon, Okla.

• $9.38 million to renovate a century-old train depot in Lancaster County, Pa., that has not been used for three decades.

Or:

• $800,000 for the John Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pa., serving about 20 passengers per day, to build a backup runway.

Or:

• $462,000 to purchase 22 concrete toilets for use in the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri

As long as somebody’s getting paid to pursue these ridiculous projects that would never, ever get funded if they were relying on the private sector, then that means a job has been “created or saved,” and thus, the “stimulus” money is having the desired effect.

Right?

Of course, if that’s the case, we maybe should have seen some economic benefits, economy-wide, by now. Maybe? Nine months after the bill passed?

Maybe. At the very least, optimism should bloom from the knowledge that all that money is being poured – like liquefied animal waste products on a cornfield – into the economy. Optimism, expectations, speculation have a lot to do with economic indicators, at least in the short term.

But:

The unemployment rate hit a 26-year high of 9.8 percent in September. Most analysts expect a 9.9 percent reading for October.

And, while acknowledging that projections tend to suck:

…A Fed staff projection used by policymakers at the September 22-23 FOMC meeting showed unemployment holding as high as 9.25 percent by the end of 2010 and then falling to about 8.0 percent by the end of 2011.

It’s not like the stimulus money was taken directly out of somebody’s pocket. It wouldn’t have been in the economy without the “stimulus” bill – not yet, anyway. It was all borrowed, and will thus be sucked out of the economy in coming years.

I wonder what the effect would have been, had the “stimulus” been funded directly with tax money rather than with borrowed money. I wonder more what the effect would have been if the “stimulus” hadn’t happened at all.

Not that I have anything against people who make a living building concrete toilets.