Facts About Obama’s Porkulus Bill

And the CBO says it ain't no stimulus, it's an economy killer.

Today is the sad nail ( one of them ) into the countries coffin... sad sad day for america

The more I think about it the more I am of the opinion that the Obama and congress seem to think that the way to fight a fire is with gasoline.  They figure if we toss enough onto the fire then it will go out and everything will be great.  But if just one ember remains the fire will re-ignite and be much, much worse. 

Here's my prediction:

The porkulus package will pass the Senate and will start getting applied in the May-June timeframe much like last years.

This will boost the economy temporarily but by the end of the year we will be right back where we started.  In fact I won't be at all surprised if by the end of the year congress is talking about putting together a third stimulus bill.

So if I'm reading this right, spending money on energy efficiency, security personel, waste disposal, flood defences, fighting health epidemics, education, and fire services is all 'pork'?! In that case, give me all the pork I can eat!

Maudlin - nobody claims those things have no intrinsic value.  Furthermore, we are already spending a shitload on all of those things already.  The additional money just shouldn't be spent on them until we have it.

Ahhh yes all that will stimulate the economy! I am all for stuff like this for the most part but it does very little to get the economy back on track. In fact any kind of spending... really wont help.

Plus I though BO was going to balance the budget? Alot of stuff you listed is going to be added to the yearly bedget... so what is going to get cut? NOTHING. NADA... who is paying for all of this ? WE are. You my friend can pay my part... untill the gov can actually balance a dang budget they dont be needing to ADD more debt to my kids thank you very much

I haven't heard anyone claim that the money allocated in the porkulus bill isn't "needed".  What people have been saying is that a lot of the items in the bill are NOT stimulus, they will do nothing to actually stimulate the economy.  Energy efficiency is a great idea but putting money into it isn't going to create long lasting jobs and therefore is NOT going to stimulate the economy.  Arguing whether the money is needed is a completely different debate and should be left to the various appropriations bills that need to be approved every year.  The same can be said for the rest of those items as well.

It doesn't need to create long lasting jobs, it just needs to create jobs for a couple of years when things will have started to recover and those jobs can be filled elsewhere. At least with energy efficiency you will have a long term benefit (saving) that will help offset wholly or partially the interest payments on the debt you've had to take out to fund the spending initially.

So what are you proposing, that the government cuts back spending to balance the budget in the middle of a recession (and/or raises taxes)? That would be a near-certain recipe for creating a massive depression. Unfortunately the government has been put into the position of needing to borrow hefty amounts of money by the reckless overspending of the Bush administration during a time when it wasn't needed.

But see that's the danger of temporary jobs.  What if the economy takes longer to recover because of all the spending that the government is doing?  What if the spending is fueling the lack of confidence in the market, which is rather likely?  What if there aren't jobs for those people when the temporary work runs out?  We end up right back in this same position, so what do we do then.  Do we go through another massive spending bill in the hopes that this time the economy will recover in time to catch the people as the work dries up?  At what point do you say enough is enough?

Of course not.  The last thing you want to do in a recession is raise taxes, but what should have happened during all of those years of economic growth was government programs that were wasteful (most of them) should have been cut and the deficit should have been paid down rather than exploding.  Part of the reason for our current crisis is the size of the deficit, adding onto is hardly a way to solve the problem.  You don't dig yourself out of hole by digging the hold deeper.

I thought that was rather ironic myself.  The "good" news is that it sounds like the money for the polar ice breaker was one of the items cut out of the bill over the weekend.

You wanna pour gasoline on a raging fire, go right ahead.  I'd rather starve the fire of oxygen, myself.  Bush vs. Obama is an idiotic argument - Congress spends our money and is responsible for deficits.  The most any president can do is request &/or veto and, thanks to the way Congress is too chickenshit to consider spending measures on their individual merits (hence 'Omnibus' reconciliation bills), he's pretty much damned if does, damned if he doesn't.  We already know that massive deficit spending has failed to deliver - the unemployment rate in 1939 was virtually the same as it was in 1931.  We were told in October that TARP would 'solve' the crisis.  Well, it didn't, & now we're told the 'crisis' will be a 'catastrophe' if we don't mortgage our children's future beyond all hope of recovery.  There ain't enough money to satisfy the thug thieves of Reid & Pelosi's mob.

p.s.  I hate Congress.

You're not alone.  And before people go claiming that I'm only saying that because I hate Dems, I hated congress when the Republicans were running the show too.  Congress has a major disconnect with their constituents.  Why anyone re-elects these jokers is beyond me.  We need a complete overhaul in congress, kick everyone out and start anew, and start by adding term limits to the offices.

I stopped reading right after I saw this comment. That right there shows the ignorance of peoples comments just to have a disagreement with someone of an opposing party. The article said enough and would be pointless to argue when a comment like the one above is thrown in.

So when the former secretary that lost her job today finishes her BO construction job (building roads and bridges) in two or three years, she can start her job making bio-diesel. Great Plan, sign me up at that fantasy job center. You;d have to be 18 years old to go through all those career/skill changes. If I were an employer I would make sure the person I hired had no qualification to do the work I needed done   (got to love the liberal work ethic). BO must think people in their 40's, 50's, and 60's are not losing jobs. I suppose the new college major will be call "Everything" so you can qualify to work any job.

Here's the truth of the matter. Few people that are not currently working in "road" construction (they don't need carpenters and roofers to make roads) will not be getting that new BO job. They are doing major interstate road work near my home. I never see more than a dozen men working the project. Why? Because most of the work is done by specialized machinery. Obama loves to cite FDR, great, back then men (lots of them) used shovels and picks to build roads. Unless his "change" is to build as we did in the 1930's, that is the stupid solution I'd expect from someone that probably never did any manual labor in their entire life.

Now I'm all for fixing roads, just don't think for a moment this will solve the economic issues. Few average people will get some of that money and a few others wil get a lot of it.

There's so much shit in this massive Trojan horse that we will regret, makes me want to puke.  I feel so sorry for my kids & grandkids; sad thing is my kids were suckered by the rhetoric (and the fanned hatred of Bush) and voted for him.  My grandkids may never know the true joys of a free and unencumbered society.  Beginning to look like Orwell was only off by about 30 years.

You spend a bit more until the economy does recover. So long as the recession is expected to be short term (i.e. a few years) and not permanent or long term, then you don't have so much of a problem. History has shown that over the long term economies will grow at a fairly consistent rate (the amount escapes me atm, IIRC it's around 1-2% pa), so it would be unrealistic to expect things not to recover. You would only say 'enough is enough' if you believed that you wouldn't have such a recovery eventually.

While I agree with the first part (it's pretty much exactly what I've been saying), I disagree with the second. The economic cycle has it's ups and downs - during the ups you should be reducing the deficit (and ideally creating a surplus), but during the downs you should then increase the deficit. The result is that instead of a 'boom-bust' style economy you create one with smooth, steadily, reliable growth. Because you don't grow excessively you're far less likely to suffer negative growth, meaning confidence will be far higher, businesses can plan further in the future, can undertake investment with greater confidence/less risk, and you benefit overall as a result.

It's too late to save now, but that shouldn't mean the second part is similarly abandoned - it would still be better to borrow now (and repay it in the next growth period) than to let the recession get even worse - for a start you'd help avoid some of the 'negative spiral' effects such as demand falling causing firms to fire staff to cut costs causing demand to fall further.

I'm not supporting that if you noticed - I was dubious at the time whether it was a good idea (since the only reasons I could think of for trying to justify it were never really made, making me doubt whether such reasons existed), and nothings happened since to really make me change that view. It's essentially spending money to boost banks balance sheets, and hoping that will feed through to increased loans and hence increased demand, as opposed to just spending that money directly (and/or giving it to people who will spend it)

True there may be issues with accessability to certain markets and how easily transferable skills are for them. I've no problem with someone who argues that money shouldn't be spent in x area because of that (since if new workers can't get to that market then the whole point of the spending in the first place is largely negated). However until now I haven't seen anyone trying to argue that. To be clear though I have no problem with tempoary jobs that won't last where it is fairly easy for people to switch into that occupation. In fact to achieve the aim of boosting demand, the government could take it to the extreme and hire people to dig holes, then hire more people to fill in those same holes (and make the jobs low paying to attract those with the highest marginal propensity to spend). Similarly a less extreme version would be to get people to do a job that machines could do slightly more efficiently (such as helping build roads) if using the machines would take too much time in training.

Nice theory, but won't happen.  There's not a chance in hell of any of the programs sundowning - they'll just find something new with which to justify their continuing existence.  Too many people (read: voters) will be dependent on them for any group of politicians to have the guts to pull the plug and mission creep is a too well-entrenched a feature of bureaucratic life.  Never been a bureaucrat who hasn't claimed that if they'd just had 'enough' money, the mission would have been achieved, the corollary being that no program has ever had 'enough' money.

I do agree that it would be unrealistic to expect things not to recover - which is why we don't need to dig this monstrous money crater that our kids & grandkids will have break their backs to fill.

That'd be nice it would work but as past experience has shown us once the government grows it doesn't ever contract.

But how much is a bit more?  $1 billion? $50 billion? $100 billion? $500 billion?  At what point do you declare we have spent enough?  If the theory is that the economy will recover anyway then why bother spending any money to "stimulate" it, why not just let it run it's course and maybe up the unemployment benefits period to help people cope in the mean time?  Why create a false demand for jobs in the mean time?

This would be the absolute worst application of tax payer money.  I would much rather increase unemployment benefits to have the person out there looking for a real job rather than paying them to do an absolutely worthless job.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm not too sanguine on the future of our Constitutional republic.  Our representatives no longer seem to represent and are about to voluntarily transform us into a socialist republic, apparently on the theory that one large socialist republic will succeed where a union of separate socialist republics has been shown to fail.  That the Dems and their media sycophants have managed to persuade a sizable number of our citizens that our own fundamental principles of freedom and free enterprise are our problem is simply tragic.  The systematic dismantling of our Constitutional republic starts with HR1 of the 111th.

According to an article that I read on either Foxnews or cnn (I can't remember which) the democratic representatives are told to basically fall in line with the party leadership.  I beleive the representative that was interviewed (the name escapes me but it was one of the 11 that voted against the stimulus bill in the House) said that he felt as though the representatives were treated as "mushrooms".  I can't say for certain but I would assume the the republican leadership treats their representatives in much the same way.  This is why we end up with votes that end up along strict party lines so often, our representatives no longer represent the people but the party.  Why anyone continues to re-elect these jokers is beyond me.

Interesting take on it from across the pond.

Just make sure that any spending plans are 1-offs (even if you spread out the spending over several years). That way to keep spending that money once the recession is over the government would effectively need a new bail out bill which would be far harder to justify politically (and economically). The government also realistically wouldn't be able to keep maintaining a massive deficit indefinitely - they'd have to cut back, even if they only did it in proportionate terms rather than nominal terms (e.g. keep spending the same amount while enjoying slowly increasing tax revenues meaning the deficit falls steadily, and the percentage of GDP being spent also falls).

Please show me where they've 'made sure' of that.

"Just make sure that any spending plans are 1-offs"

Once the government gets into things, it is hard to get them out.  We were paying a tax on telecomunications that was enacted in 1898 during the Spanish-American War.  Back then only the "rich" had phones.  It took over 100 years to get that one repealed.

There is more permanent and certain-to-grow bureacracy created by this bill than by all the bills since LBJ created the Great Society.  That worked out well, didn't it?  Liberals are one-trick ponies - make it bigger, create more bureacrats (read: Democrat voters), steal spend more money.  Rinse, repeat.  What's the problem we're trying to fix, you ask?  Doesn't matter - any and all problems will do.