Imagine that. The most expensive social experiment in American history — one that will cost taxpayers more than both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined — was allotted less than a single day of debate in Congress.
How many speed-reading whiz-kid representatives do you think slogged past their own pork to read the entire 647 (or so) pages of the "stimulus" menu?
This week, more than 200 notable economists — including three Nobel laureates — signed an open letter in The New York Times challenging President Barack Obama's false suggestion that all economists agree a bailout is needed. It was titled: "With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true."
So though Nobel laureates can't reach anything resembling a consensus, your former community organizing/car-dealing/ambulance-chasing congressperson has the intellectual capacity to digest a $900 billion piece of legislation in mere days.
Amazing.
Name a single Iraq war supplemental that wasn't debated to death? You can't?
And did you know, that when the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 came before the Congress there were 1,000 hours of debate?
So what does the largest and most intrusive spending package in the history of the US get in Nancy Pelosi's House?
An hour.
One stinking hour.
Yup - the same people who are screaming their guts out about the misuse of the first half of the TARP funds are now proposing two and a half times that amount of spending and deem it only worth - an hour.
They tell us it can't wait. They tell us this is so important to talk about or examine. Instead we must - wait for it - trust them.
My goodness, if you're not laughing out loud, you ought to be. Then you should cry.
Trust them? They bear as much responsibility for us being in the shape we are financially and economically as anyone. And when they tried this recently they ended up not even knowing where the first $350 billion went. And now they want more and don't intend to debate it or examine the bill in detail?
No sale. I wouldn't be satisfied with a 1,000 hours of debate on this turkey.
I'd love to see Congress answer any one of them, much less all 10. Like:
Politicians say deficit spending will expand the economy (as if President Bush's $300 billion budget deficits brought economic nirvana). If that were true, then the current $1.2 trillion deficit — the largest in history — would already be rescuing the economy. It's obviously not. So why would $800 billion more of the same suddenly end the recession?
Or:
We're told that government spending will add new spending power to the economy. But Congress doesn't have a vault of money waiting to be distributed: Every dollar lawmakers "inject" into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. If government borrows the money from American investors, investment spending drops accordingly. If it's borrowed from foreigners, net exports drop accordingly. How does borrowing $800 billion from one group of people and giving that $800 billion to another group of people make us wealthier?
Or how about:
Policymakers are basing the "stimulus" bill on economic models that wrongly assume every $1 of government spending increases the economy by approximately $1.60. Is it really that simple? By that logic, debt-ridden, big-government countries like Italy, France and Germany should be wealthier than America. And why stop at $800 billion? Such logic suggests unlimited prosperity could be guaranteed by the government borrowing and spending $800 trillion. Should America be basing such costly decisions on these types of economic models?
But you can't even ask those questions in an hour's time much less begin to answer them and all the other important questions that our "leaders" are ducking with the excuse "this is too important to wait".
Uh, no, it's not. In fact, it's too important not to wait and examine, debate and for the most part, reject.
However, given how the Democratic House refused to do that, I doubt we're ever going to see that happen. The Senate, I'm told, plans an even more expensive version than came out of the House.
And if you liked "too important to wait" on this issue, you’re soon going to get "too important to wait" on Global Warming coming right behind it, and then probably a National Health Care plan, which is clearly too important to wait as well.
Used to be for the children, now it’s just gonna be "too important to wait" for a while.
Yes, it’s too important to stop and look at what the Democrats are going to do because if we DO, and someone gets a lucid moment, they’re going to realize all they’re doing is cementing their hold on government No, wait, that would presume they KNOW what they’re doing...and they don’t, but they’re pretty sure spending is the way to warm our hearts, and that’s what they’re after. Warming our hearts, and keeping power.
weeeee haaaaa...Interesting times. But hey, Obama is popular, and, like, dude, they won, you know?
TomD - say goodbye to your majority in the next election because this baby is gonna drop a load that’s way too big for the national diaper, there’s no way the pundits and MM can spin that the Republicans were in any way, shape, size or form "in charge", And Bush/Rove/Cheney are GONE.
Not even Obama can fix this, poor guy, but that won’t stop him from tryin.
But hey, Pogue and Sarcastic will be by to tell us that Obama is doing just what they expected him to do. The question I would have to ask is what citizenship do they hold anyway? Chinese? Iranian?
Yeah, TomD is a typical clueless democrat. This presidency may set back black progression for a century
The stimulus package passed as HR-1 by the House of Representatives is a pork laden bill that also begins the potential of spiraling protectionism and inflation. Are there no senators or representatives who remember the history of the Great Depression and the impact of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the excessive spending that turned a stock market bubble collapse and recession into a severe depression by the attempt of government to spend our country out of the existing economic meltdown? Another problem from that time was the Roosevelt Administration’s inconsistent policies that made industry leery to commit investment funds. We seem to be repeating the same failures of the Great Depression. No lessons learned by Congress, the Obama Administration and the Bush Administration before it.
At least during the Great Depression we were on the gold standard where gold backed our currency. In the past year the Fed has doubled the money supply and we haven’t had gold backing our money supply since the Nixon Administration. Now we are going to add a trillion dollars of debt with the misnamed stimulus package, when interest is included, and either we must sell government bonds on a depressed world wide market and/or increase the money supply even more to cover it. Are we trying to repeat the inflation seen during the 1920’s in Germany’s Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe’s inflation rate of 11.2 million per cent today? I know, "it can’t happen here", is the prevailing opinion. But so was 9-11.
I lived, worked and owned a home during the stagflation of the Nixon and Carter Administrations and high interest rates of the early 1980s, But in those days few had loans tied to the interest rate indexes that rose as high as 15.8% for mortgages in November 1981. Fortunately I managed to obtain a “low” 9.5% for my mortgage in 1975. If you think that the economy is bad and mortgage foreclosures are outrageous now, just wait until we see interest rates at or greater than the level of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Congress either needs to change HR-1 by cutting out the pork to convert it into an actual stimulus package that impacts the economy in 2009 by utilizing tax rate cuts for all Americans and industry or just plain vote it down.
Unfortunately this bill will pass. There are just too many goodies in it for all those wonderful special interest groups, and this is the chance the hippies from the 60’s have been waiting 40 years for! Every dream appropriation they ever had is in this bill.
