Obama/Pelosi/Reid "Gang of Three Pork-a-thon"?

[WhiskeyGirl]

Spend. Spend. Spend.

Posted by Shawn Mallow
Published: February 2, 2009 - 7:07 PM

This is change? This is hope?

This is not being afraid of "listening to new ideas, take(ing) chances." as Senator Inouye said today in Senate deliberations about the Obama/Pelosi/Reid "Gang of Three Pork-a-thon"?

All we heard from Senate Democrats today was about spending. Spending on educating, welfare, health care, the nebulous "infrastructure", Medicaid funding, disabled people, Head Start, Pell grants, unemployment extensions.

All worthy things taken by themselves, but, not ONE will help to stimulate the economy.

It is time to bury out-dated Keynesian economics forever.

The experiment of spending your way out of a recession with money we don't have has time and again succeeded to fail, and this immoral, $825 billion spending package will be no exception.

We need deep tax cuts, across the board, to stimulate his economy and shock it back to life. Corporate, personal, and property taxes need to be cut by double-digit percentage points of what they are now.

I recall reading somewhere that all that pork money would just clog the system and prevent hiring and job creation - nobody would know what to do with all that money, 'cept maybe for a Wall Street banker...where can I find one of those?

This bill, as is, gooped up with economy-clogging pork spending will haunt us for years to come. Spending money we don't have on projects which don't help, all the while paying interest on it, makes one pine for the seemingly fiscally responsible days of the Bush Administration. Who wouldn't love to have a deficit of only $400 billion instead of over $2 trillion? The Democrats are willing to destroy the free market economy in order to enact proposals that will cement their power, creating a leftist regime which will drive this country to bankruptcy.

The nation is already broke.  No old money left, just the new crisp stuff that comes out in maybe $1,000,000 bills...imho

Stop screwing around. Create a plan which cuts taxes and addresses current emergency spending needs, and you might just succeed.

Go down this road, and, if you haven't destroyed the country yet, you'll have another Republican Revolution on your hands in 2010.

http://wizbangblog.com/content/2009/02/02/spend-spend-spend.php

I've often wondered if people donated generously this year to political campaigns because they knew the money would soon be worthless...might as well dump it...

I say...let states borrow the money for their own pork projects.  Where is the new accountability?  Fiscal discipline?  Why doesn't that start in Washington?  Capitol Hill?  Why isn't the spending coming from the grass roots of Main Street?  REBUILD AND SPEND FROM THE GROUND UP...

jmho

[WhiskeyGirl]

It’s Not a ‘Stimulus’ Plan — It’s a ‘Porkulus’ Plan

By Peter Roff
Senior Fellow at the Institute for Liberty/Former Senior Political Writer for United Press International

The bad economy, plus Obama’s vaunted net roots political machine, his 53 percent victory, and the Gallup organization’s new assertion that the number of safe Republican states is down to about five — with none in the solid South — was supposed to have stampeded everyone into voting for Porkulus. Obama made a show of “listening” to the Republicans. And he did “reach out” to them — but only so far as to let them know his heels were dug in and he wasn’t in the mood to negotiate. He would, however, feel bad while watching them complain about it on FOX News, or so one person present in the meeting alleged.

The partisan nature of the support for Porkulus has sparked a stream of confused comment from the Democrats and the liberal allies — who suddenly seem to have forgotten they won the election. The scheme to make Porkulus a bi-partisan effort is collapsing, stripping them of the political cover they were depending on to protect them once America learns what is really in the bill.

So the gloves have been taken off. MoveOn.Org let its members know by e-mail over the weekend that Porkulus is in trouble:

“President Obama’s economic recovery plan just passed in the House-it’s got billions of dollars for education, mass transit, and clean energy. But what really gets me is that not a single Republican voted for it, despite all the efforts by President Obama to reach across the aisle. If the same thing happens in the Senate, it won’t pass.”

So MoveOn thinks Porkulus won’t pass because it didn’t get any GOP votes in the House and it may not get any GOP votes in the Senate, where the Democrats hold a majority of 59 out of 100 seats. Hmmm…

By maintaining a posture of relative silence, in comparison to the Democrats on Iraq during the Bush years or the Republicans on health care (at least under Clinton), the Republicans are letting the nation see President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and their Porkulus package for what they really are.

http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/02/02/roff_stimulus_obama/

I didn't even notice that bit from the MoveOn message...hmmm...

Democrats don't really need any Republican help...

[WhiskeyGirl]

Obama Stimulus Package - Perpetual Debt for Future Generations?

Regardless of the specifics of President Barack Obama's stimulus plan, the dollar amount or where it will be spent, all of the money for this action will be borrowed. This plan has the potential to become a perpetual burden for future generations. To avoid that, any stimulus package must include a mechanism for repayment of the resulting debt.

Consider: Of the $820 billion stimulus package, roughly $220 billion will be used to purchase capital assets; items such as buildings, autos and equipment. In the past, the federal government has borrowed to buy such assets using perpetual debt. Money borrowed to buy such assets over the last 50 years has never been repaid. Our debt has only gone up during that time.

It is more than likely that many of the assets purchased over the past 50 years were long ago sent to the scrap heap. And we continue to pay interest on the debt that funded those purchases with no plan to ever pay it off.

It is not fiscally sound for this stimulus plan's debt to survive in perpetuity. Indeed, for another day, but soon, we should exam how we might put in place a mechanism to repay most if not all of the present federal debt. It can be done. That way the debts incurred by this generation do not become the burden of the generations that follow.

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-gingerella0203.artfeb03,0,6282489.story

If the debt had to be paid off when the recession is over...I think the recession will last forever from a political 'technical' point of view.  A similar reason the Social Security Trust Fund is empty - there is no trust and their is no fund...no magic wand...

jmho

[WhiskeyGirl]

How about a grass roots recovery like this?

Wisconsin taxpayers...are you willing to borrow $500 billion dollars for condoms, bridges, roads, and educational grants, light bulbs, and other pork and pay it back at some unknown time and at some unknown tax rate? 

(I would hope someone in my state would stand up and say "What!!! Are you crazy nuts?")

North Dakota taxpayers...

California taxpayers...

(imho)

[WhiskeyGirl]

Some Things You Should Know About the Stimulus Package

Tuesday, February 03, 2009 
By Bill O'Reilly

President Obama is signaling that he will work with the Senate to cut some of the excess spending the House passed as part of the economic stimulus package.

Now the architect of the House bill was Congressman David Obey, a liberal Democrat from Wisconsin, who loaded up more than $800 billion in government spending, concentrating on union workers and the environment.

Obey worked closely with Speaker Nancy Pelosi to steer federal dollars into mass transit, health care and union jobs, including hundreds of thousands for the Service Employees International Union, a radical left outfit which donates heavily to the Democratic Party.

In short, it is clear that House Democrats used the economic stimulus bill to finance entitlements and social engineering projects, thereby angering free marketeers who want most of the tax dollars to flow directly into the private economy.

Of course, it is almost impossible for you, the American voter, to know what Obey and Pelosi were doing since the bill ran more than 600 pages. It has taken "The Factor" about a week to sort it all out.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,487344,00.html

[WhiskeyGirl]

Economists know that real infrastructure improvements--roads, schools, internet upgrades, clean water projects, and a smarter energy grid--return more than a dollar in additional GDP for every federal dollar spent, if substantial amounts of the needed materials and components are not imported.

Unfortunately, too many imported components may deflate the benefits of financing windmills to generate electricity, for example, yet windmills are in the package.

Tax rebates that yielded no more than 50 cents of GDP for every dollar spent last May and June are now worth 98 cents according to Obama Administration economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. It's amazing how a change in political party at the White House can alter the math for tax breaks to constituents as quickly as it did the Democrat's view of tax evasion among Treasury and Health and Human Services nominees.

But the prizes for philandering don't go to the Democrats alone. The ever skillful drug industry is in the process of convincing the nation’s elders--leaders of both parties in the Senate--that giving the pharmaceutical industry a tax break to bring home profits on foreign operations is jobs creation. That's right; a special subsidy for outsourcing is jobs creation.

Maybe the drug companies tax break is part of the Obama jobs tally?

Why not focus on a stimulus that puts Americans back to work.  Was the promise of millions of saved or new global jobs?   Or, was there ANY promise to put Americans back to work?  Continued American wealth redistribution to foreign interests.

After the money is spent, rebated and squandered, the economy will slip back into recession, because President Obama's economists don't counsel him to fix what is really broke--the ownership structures and compensation schemes at U.S. banks in the post-Glass Steagall era, and the huge trade deficit on oil and with China that sap demand for American made goods and services and put workers on the unemployment line. In any case, the leadership in Congress does not want to genuinely tackle banking and trade issues—that would upset too many powerful contributors in Wall Street banks, the Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Senators representing those constituencies are all too happy to rail against Wall Street bonuses and Chinese currency manipulation, and extol the virtues of fuel efficient vehicles on Sunday morning talk shows and in town meetings, but nothing truly meaningful to fix the structure and compensation policies of the banks, the energy efficiency of America’s fleet of automobiles, or the ruinous trade deficit with China will likley pass the Senate this year.

Sophistry, nay hypocrisy, reigns supreme on Mount Olympus, as the nation's economy falls into tatters.

http://globalpolitician.com/25429-economics

Anyone know what toxic assets are on the balance sheets of all those bailout recipients?  Any idea when they will come clean?  Write off the bad debt?  Or will Americans continue to pour money into these sucking black holes without knowing what's really there? 

Are all these toxic items on the balance sheets of these companies?

If 'they' can find tax problems with Obama's political picks, why can't they find the ones that wrote all those bad loans?  Why can't they find and identify all those toxic assets?  Are the toxic/troubled assets on or off the balance sheet?  Just where are they that they are creating all these problems?

Maybe they're just another ripoff and don't really exist except to suck up taxpayer money?  I think the cleansing of all these toxic/troubled assets should have happened a long time ago.  Time to 'moveon'.

jmho

[WhiskeyGirl]

When we look at how we got in this fix it should be a lesson. The over-heated housing market was fueled by careless lending much of which was backed by federal requirements to lend in neighborhoods and across demographic groups that did not meet the old 20 percent down, 28 percent of income rules. There were home loans with no-down, loans with no-income requirements, loans with 40 or 60-year amortizations, loans with no-interest now, loans with interest-only, loans with balloons, loans based on greed and so forth. It was a shell game that thrived on the admirable belief that everyone should own a home. Uncontrolled borrowing, slash lending, was unrealistic and unaffordable and caused our crisis.

The stimulus package is a borrowing package with some worthwhile projects. There is $43 billion for transportation and nearly $175 billion that will be doled to the states to pay for Medicaid and education. Not much stimulus, but nice projects. We are talking about spending money we really don’t have and is money that must be borrowed from investors domestic and foreign. Before we deepen deficits projected to run into the foreseeable future, let’s at least have some sense that what we are doing has a reasonable chance of success. Let’s not push it through before the questions are answered and the T’s crossed and I’s dotted.

To quote George Bernard Shaw: “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” We are are Paul and our children are Peter.

http://www.tdn.com/articles/2009/02/07/editorial/doc498b967b9b63a315456097.txt

Greed - the greed continues.  There were also many red flags raised about the problems, but many refused to list and Capitol Hill didn't get enough votes to work on fixing the problem.

How simple and cheap would the problems have been to fix years ago?  Legislation put forth by John McCain didn't get support by many Democrats in Congress.  Previous to John McCain, there were big red flags at Fannie / Freddie and problems with executive compensation and lobbying.  Fast foward a few years.  Any one attempting to fix Fannie / Freddie?  Look at compensation at those places?  The lobbying?

What about campaign finance reform?  Current example - how many lobbyists gave money to current members of Congress?  Does this bill help their clients?  Healthcare - how many healthcare employees gave money to those in Congress and the president? 

I wonder if there is any analysis of the latest campaign contributions to determine who the new special interest groups are?

[WhiskeyGirl]

Who is going to pay for all this spending?  What are the Obama visions for future taxation to pay for all of this?

How does Obama see a way to create good paying jobs that can't be outsourced?  More big business, business to big to fail?  Government to big to fail?

When will government work for people and not for special interest groups?  I wonder how many campaign contributions came from offshore sources? 

[WhiskeyGirl]

[quote]“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is beginning to look remarkably similar to the Obama campaign’s tax and education plans,” remarked MacGuineas. “Many of these items may be worthwhile, but an emergency measure is the wrong way to push through permanent changes to the budget. If politicians want to enact long-term spending or tax policies, they should be enacted through the normal legislative process. And they should be paid for with offsetting tax or spending changes, just as President Obama committed to when he proposed the policies in the first place.”

The White House did not respond to questions about the matter. [/quote]

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/02/president-advis.html

Who's going to pay for all this spending?  A downpayment?  Who's going to make the monthly payments?  Pay off the loan?  How many generations? 

I can't imagine there will be any money/prosperity left for future generations to build and maintain America for years to come.  Where will the money come from to maintain schools and roads five years from now? 

jmho

[WhiskeyGirl]

If there is a tax credit for first time homeowners in the bill, where is the incentive for those that have lived in the same home for years?  Homes that may need a new roof, a new floor, a garage, and other improvements?

Where is the stimulus for others on Mainstreet?