The 40-Year Wish List - Fausta's Blog

UPDATE, 6:30 PM
House Passes $819B Stimulus Package
The final vote was 244-188, mostly along party lines as expected.
All Republicans, 11 Democrats voted against it.

A 40-Year Wish List
You won’t believe what’s in that stimulus bill. (emphasis added)

n selling the plan, President Obama has said this bill will make “dramatic investments to revive our flagging economy.” Well, you be the judge. Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There’s another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.

Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus. And even many of these projects aren’t likely to help the economy immediately. As Peter Orszag, the President’s new budget director, told Congress a year ago, “even those [public works] that are ‘on the shelf’ generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy.”

Then there’s the transfer payments,

Yesterday I linked to Capital Commerce’s 10 Reasons to Whack Obama’s Stimulus Plan; read all ten reasons, and remember the underlying reason for this exhorbitant and outrageous spending bill:

This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.

And, I may point out, every failed policy.

Additionally, this level of spending will be perpetuated in future budgets through “budget baselines”, even when the Democrats claim they wont. When have you seen the Democrat party not increase a government budget?

As such, it should be opposed. 200 economists have gone on record in a full-page ad stating (emphasis added)

we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

It’s time to Melt the phones

UPDATE
Stimulus Package: The Deceitful Way To Nationalize Healthcare
Progressive corporatism in action.

UPDATE 2
The Fallacy of Deficit Stimulus

Text of the bill at Read the Stimulus.org. Read it and weep.