Let's put things in perspective. In a previous post I mentioned that only $0.12 of every dollar will go to actual "stimulus" related things. This is the biggest government budget EVER, with strangely most of it going to areas where the empoyment rate is higher (see link at bottom). This is Obama on December 7th when asked by Tom Brokaw about his stimulus ideas:

quote:

OBAMA: When I met with the governors.. all of them have projects that are shovel-ready. Now we're going to have to prioritize it and do it, uh, not in the old traditional, uh, politics-first-way. What we need to do is, uh, examine what are the projects where we're going to get the most bang for the buck. How are we going to make sure taxpayers are protected. Uh, you know, uh, the days of just pork coming out of Congress as a strategy, uh, those days are over.

Obviously not, but who cares, Obama won so whatever he does is cool, right? Take the following into consideration:

*In 1993, the unemployment was virtually the same as the rate today (around 7%). Yet, President Clinton's proposed stimulus legislation only contained $16 billion in spending

*More money to be increased to the education budget than the entire budget total of 10 years ago. If you go to private schools, you get nothing. This means unless you work for a union, you're left out in the cold.

*The total cost of this one piece of legislation is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire federal government.

*Taxpayers are being asked to spend $646,214 PER GOVT. JOB! (see link at the bottom)

*President-elect Obama has said that his proposed stimulus legislation will create or save 3 million jobs. This means that this legislation will spend about $275,000 per job (about 8 times what it costs the private sector). The average household income in the U.S. is $42,000 a year.

*This bill will cost each and every household $6,700 in additional debt, paid for by our children and grandchildren.

*Although this legislation has been billed and described as a transportation and infrastructure investment package, but only three percent ($30 billion) of this package is for road and highway spending.

*Much of the funding within the proposed stimulus package will go to programs which already have large, unexpended balances. For example, the draft bill provides $1 billion for Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), which already has $16 billion on hand. And, this year, Congress has plans to rescind $9 billion in highway funding that the states have not yet used.

*Deficit spending will not expand the economy. If that were true, then the current $1.2 trillion deficit -- the largest in history -- would already be rescuing the economy. $800+ billion more will not change that.

*Trade groups state that every $1 billion in highway "stimulus" can be spent creating 34,779 new construction jobs. But Congress must first borrow that $1 billion out of the private sector. The private sector then loses or forgoes roughly the same number of jobs.

Exit question to Republican Eric Cantor of VA today:

quote:

If this bill is so magical, if this bill is going to accomplish everything in terms of stimulus and bring back prosperity and full employment, why doesn't [Obama] want it to be only a Democrat vote? He could ruin the Republican Party forever! If this bill actually works as he says and none of you vote for it, he can come back when it's in full fledged success mode and say, "These guys opposed it. They didn't want this." They could destroy you guys, but yet he wants your cover on this.

True.

And for the final scary fact:

quote:

The Obama administration claims the stimulus bill will "create or save three or four million jobs over the next two years . . . with over 90% [of those jobs] in the private sector." To prove it, they issued a report from Christina Romer, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. Its key estimates, however, were simply lifted from an outdated paper by Mark Zandi of Moody's economy.com. Mr. Zandi's current estimates have government employment growing by 330,400 over two years as a result of the House bill (compared with 244,000 in Bernstein-Romer paper). Yet even that updated figure still amounts to only 8.3% of total jobs added, even though state and local governments are to receive 39% of the funds ($214.5 billion). Spending $214.5 billion to create or save 330,400 government jobs implies that taxpayers are being asked to spend $646,214 per job.

How can you guys support this????

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123310498020322323.html

Didn't you just post this thread?

___________________

quote:

Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov Didn't you just post this thread?

no this is more of a focus on the actual stimulus bill itself... the other one is more geared towards Obama saying 2 completely different things just 3 weeks apart as part of a blatant strategy to create a perception of his ideas that aren't true.

to add to the premise:

Provided further, That of the amount appropriated under this heading ["Prevention and Wellness Fund"] not less than $2,350,000,000 shall be transferred to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as follows:

(1) not less than $954,000,000 shall be used as an additional amount to carry out the immunization program authorized by section 317(a), (j), and (k)(1) of the Public Health Service Act (‘‘section 317 immunization program’’), of which $649,900,000 shall be available on October 1, 2009;

(2) not less than $296,000,000 shall be used as an additional amount to carry out Part A of title XIX of the Public Health Service Act, of which $148,000,000 shall be available on October 1, 2009;

(3) not less than $545,000,000 shall be used as an additional amount to carry out chronic disease, health promotion, and genomics programs, as jointly determined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services ("Secretary") and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("Director");

(4) not less than $335,000,000 shall be used as an additional amount to carry out domestic HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis, sexually-transmitted diseases, and tuberculosis prevention programs, as jointly determined by the Secretary and the Director;

(5) not less than $60,000,000 shall be used as an additional amount to carry out environmental health programs, as jointly determined by the Secretary and the Director;

(6) not less than $50,000,000 shall be used as an additional amount to carry out injury prevention and control programs, as jointly determined by the Secretary and the Director;

(7) not less than $30,000,000 shall be used as an additional amount for public health workforce development activities, as jointly determined by the Secretary and the Director;

(8) not less than $40,000,000 shall be used as an additional amount for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to carry out research activities within the National Occupational Research Agenda; and

(9) not less than $40,000,000 shall be used as an additional amount for the National Center for Health Statistics:

Provided further, That of the amount appropriated under this heading not less than $150,000,000 shall be available for an additional amount to carry out activities to implement a national action plan to prevent healthcare-associated infections, as determined by the Secretary, of which not less $50,000,000 shall be provided to States to implement healthcare-associated infection reduction strategies:

Provided further, That of the amount appropriated under this heading $500,000,000 shall be used to carry out evidence-based clinical and community-based prevention and wellness strategies and public health workforce development activities authorized by the Public Health Service Act, as determined by the Secretary, that deliver specific, measurable health outcomes that address chronic and infectious disease rates and health disparities, which shall include evidence-based interventions in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, tobacco cessation and smoking prevention, and oral health, and which may be used for the Healthy Communities program administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other existing community-based programs administered by the Department of Health and Human Services.



read the bill. >HERE PDF< it's a monumental piece of legislative deception.

EDIT> every House Republican voted no on this, praise be to Allah

Last edited by Q5echo on Jan-29-2009 at 02:08

LOL Q5 @ that last line in your post.

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before." -Rahm Emanuel

How about these additions too that I just read:

There's $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn't turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects.

Another "stimulus" secret is that some $252 billion is for income-transfer payments -- that is, not investments that arguably help everyone, but cash or benefits to individuals for doing nothing at all. There's $81 billion for Medicaid, $36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits, $20 billion for food stamps, and $83 billion for the earned income credit for people who don't pay income tax. While some of that may be justified to help poorer Americans ride out the recession, they aren't job creators.

Some $6 billion of this will subsidize university building projects. If you think the intention here is to help kids learn, the House declares on page 257 that "No recipient . . . shall use such funds to provide financial assistance to students to attend private elementary or secondary schools." Horrors: Some money might go to nonunion teachers.

As for the promise of accountability, some $54 billion will go to federal programs that the Office of Management and Budget or the Government Accountability Office have already criticized as "ineffective" or unable to pass basic financial audits. These include the Economic Development Administration, the Small Business Administration, the 10 federal job training programs, and many more.

quote:

This is supposed to be a new era of bipartisanship, but this bill was written based on the wish list of every living -- or dead -- Democratic interest group. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, "We won the election. We wrote the bill." So they did. Republicans should let them take all of the credit

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123310466514522309.html