What Exactly Are We Stimulating?

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

Back in early January, the New York Post reported that then President-elect Obama had warned Congress that he would bar all pork-barrel projects from the stimulus plan he was asking them to pass. He said that his program “will have a higher standard of accountability, transparence and oversight.”

So how did that work out?

It’s tough to find out exactly what’s in the bill that the House of Representatives passed – after all, it’s 600 pages long. But we have heard about:

• $400 million for sexually transmitted disease prevention
  
• $350 million for computers at the USDA
  
• $400 million to replace the Social Security Administration’s National Computer Center
  
• $8 billion to upgrade facilities and information technology at the State Department
  
• $10 billion for science facilities, research, and instrumentation
  
• $6.7 billion for renovations and repairs to federal buildings
  
• $462 million for the Centers for Disease Control to “complete its Buildings and Facilities Master Plan”
  
• $400 million to “put more scientists to work doing climate change research”
  
• $209 million for agricultural research facilities
  
• $200 million “to address the deterioration of the National Mall,” $150 million to “address the repair backlog at the Smithsonian,” and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.
  
• Tax “rebates” for people who don’t make enough to pay any income tax. (But don’t you dare call this “income redistribution!”)

I could go on and on. In fact, you can read the 13-page summary released by the House Committed on Appropriations at http://appropriations.house.gov/pdf/PressSummary01-15-09.pdf. The question is: How, exactly, will these specifically address the causes of the current recession, stimulate the economy and benefit the ordinary Americans who are hurting right now? They may be worthy things to fund – but they should be put forward, debated, and voted on in their own right as part of a spending package, not buried in a so-called economic stimulus package that is being promoted with an “Oh-my-God-we-have-to-do-something-right-now!” urgency. Even Democrat Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska is saying that “tens of billions” of dollars need to be stripped out of the package.

So how did it get to be this way? Let me remind you of Rahm Emmanuel’s comment at that Wall Street Journal conference back in November: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” So Rahm’s former colleagues in the House seized the opportunity to advance their liberal social agenda under the guise of an economic stimulus package, and Nancy Pelosi rammed it through despite bipartisan opposition. (Yes, the package was so egregious that eleven Democrats in the House broke with their party to vote against it.)

I agree that we need to invest some money on infrastructure in this country. And there are portions of this package that will help put people to work and help speed the economic recovery – particularly the tax cuts. But the Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for all the irrelevant spending they’ve jammed into this bill...but they aren’t – because to any good Liberal, the end justifies the means. I hope that the Senate stands firm and brings some sanity to the package.

It’s hard to imagine how much money we’re talking about. If you had been spending $1 million every day since the day Jesus was born, you still wouldn’t have spent as much money as the stimulus package will spend – you’d have another five hundred years to go.

Heck, if the government just has to spend a trillion dollars or so, how about this idea: The Federal Reserve estimates that in November, 2008, the total amount of revolving debt (of which credit card debt is the biggest component) in America was about $982 billion. So let’s take the stimulus money and just pay off everyone’s credit card balances! Now there’s a bailout I could get behind! It would immediately clear a lot of risky outstanding credit off the books of the banking institutions, and lift a huge debt load from the backs of consumers! The resulting consumer spending spree would jump-start the economy in a heartbeat!

Thanks for listening.