Is The Stimulus Really Working?

President Obama took to the campaign trail, um, I mean the road today to speak (with his teleprompter of course) to a group of 25 police recruits who's jobs were "saved" by the stimulus.

"For those who doubt the success of the recovery plan, I ask them to talk to the teachers who are still able to teach our children" as a result of it," Obama said, also citing nurses, firefighters and police officers as among those helped by the plan.

"I ask them to come to Ohio to meet the 25 men and women who will soon be protecting the streets of Columbus because we passed this plan," he said. "I look at their badges today and know we did the right thing."

The police recruits will take their jobs thanks to a $1.25-million cash infusion from the recently passed stimulus package, a slice allotted after Mayor Michael Coleman personally pleaded his city's case to the White House.

Of course, if you read the whole article, you notice this little nasty bit of fine print.

The money Obama delivered will cover the officers' salaries for one calendar year, but police officials aren't sure where the funding will come from for next year's pay. They've halted all recruit training for the time being.

So by his own words, President Obama has said his stimulus package will save or create up to 4 million jobs. So, by my calculation, that's only 3,999,975 more jobs to go. Better get cracking Mr. President.

We're Financing a Different Bridge to Nowhere

Hey, so the first funds of the stimulus money have just been spent. Want to know where?

Somewhere in Tuscumbia, Missouri.

Where?

Tuscumbia, Missouri. Population 218. Yes, population 218.

Clearly, this is a great use of federal stimulus funds (insert dripping sarcasm here).

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if someone shows up at the White House and tries to sell President Obama the Eiffel Tower. Given how he's been spending the taxpayer money, he'd probably buy it.

This Should Give You Pause

This is the current headline on Drudge and boy, did it get my attention.

Taxpayers risk $9.7 Trillion on bailouts as Senate votes

Yikes!

My Immediate Stimulus

My big problem with the stimulus bill is that it's filled with more pork that a package of Farmer John bacon. Rather than detail all of it here, I'll let some people who've actually gone through it do it for me.

There are a lot of things in the bill that people can make an argument for funding. However, this is supposed to be an economic stimulus bill, not an appropriations bill. This bill's cost is up to $900 billion. Shouldn't we be asking how are we going to pay for all this? And with Congressional Budget forecasting that some of this money won't be spent until 2010 and 2011, how is that going to help the economy in the short term?

My proposal is simple.

1) Extend unemployment benefits for the next year. This will immediately help people who have been laid off.

2) Suspend the payroll tax for the next six months. This will immediately put money back in the hands of working people and their employers.

3) Cut every tax bracket by 5% and make it retroactive to last year. This will give everybody bigger rebate checks.

4) Cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%. Make that permanent. Encourage more businesses to do business in America by bringing our corporate tax rate more in line with (and in some places lower than) the rest of the world.

Once those things are done, then we can look at spending government money on infrastructure building - like updating the national power grid, which really should be done. Currently, there is $4.5 billion alloted in the bill to update the grid. The problem is that a 2004 study estimated that is would take at least $165 billion to actually do it right. Who's paying attention to these figures?

Let's take those four steps I outlined above to provide immediate relief. Then Congress and the President can sit down and actually write a good bill rather than rush something through and get it wrong.

Hope and Fear?

At his inaugural address, FDR said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, as he rallied Americans to rise out of the doldrums of the Great Depression. (Never mind that FDR's policies might have made the Great Depression last longer than necessary. That's a post for another date.) The point is that he was an eternal optimist and projected that to the American people.

Well, I guess Barack Obama is no FDR. In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, President Obama says that if Congress doesn't immediately pass his stimulus bill that "Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse."

Way to sell hope and change President Obama. Didn't you campaign by saying that President Bush's politics of fear was wrecking our country?

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Rush Limbaugh vs. The Stimulus

Since President Obama has declared that Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republicans, Rush has decided to play along and offer his own version of a stimulus proposal in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today.

It's definitely worth reading.

More Stimulus Nonsense

I know that everybody out there is saying that based on the results of the 2008 election, the Republicans are going to be out of power for a long time. I disagree. Right now, the Republicans have a great shot to set themselves up for retaking Congress in 2010 if they do one simple thing - vote against the $825 billion stimulus boondoggle that is making it's way along Capitol Hill.

The single biggest thing that John McCain did wrong was not running against the bailout when the economy went south. Instead, he suspended his campaign, went to Washington DC under the guise of we must make a deal, and then got burned when the original bill went down in flames. Whomever thought that letting John McCain go to Washington DC to try to make a deal gave him bad advice. I'm not a political operative, yet I could have told you that a Democratic Congress that was desperate in its attempt to recapture the White House was not going to let John McCain take any credit for any deal that was ever going to get made. And since McCain had no plan to offer, it made him look unpredictable and flighty. Then after railing against corporate fat cats, he votes "yes" on the stimulus anyway. At that point, to borrow a phrase from TMQ, I wrote "game over" in my notebook regarding the election.

Had McCain actually had a plan that did not include fleecing the American taxpayer and had he presented this plan to Congress and had the Democrats rejected it, then he could have run against the bailout. That I think would have resonated more with the American public than airing commercials about Obama and his ties to Bill Ayers.

But we'll never know.

As for this "stimulus" bill, according to a Wall Street Journal editorial, their estimate, after reading the entire bill which I doubt many members of Congress have actually done, only $90 billion actually go towards infrastructure projects that Obama and the Democrats have been touting. The rest is just giveaways to things such as Amtrak, global warming studies, the NEA (not that I don't think they deserve funding but in a stimulus bill? puh-lease), carbon capture studies, well, you get the idea. Some projects won't even be funded until year 3 or 4 of the spending plan. How does that stimulate the economy?

Now if this bill was all about upgrading infrastructure, like the power grid and such, I'd vote for it in a heartbeat because those things need to be upgraded. But this bill contains more pork than a package of Farmer John bacon.

Republicans have put forth their own plan. They should hold as many press conferences between now and the vote and highlight the fact that their proposal contains no new spending and puts money back in the hands of the people who actually work. Then they should vote "no" on the bill that the Democrats wrote and so eagerly want to pass.

And then when the country is still running giants deficits in 2010 and President Obama and Speaker Pelosi are talking about hiking taxes about the time inflation hits, the Republicans will run against the "stimulus bill" and sweep back to power.

Of course, if the stimulus bill works (and if it does I will change my middle name to "bin Laden" and re-register as a socialist), then the Republicans will be running against a very popular Democratic party. However, if I were a Republican Congressman, that's a chance I'd be willing to take. Put another way: if you vote for the bill and it works, the Democrats will not let you take any credit anyway, so you may as well stick to your principles and vote "no."