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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2009-01-28

The Obama--and ONLY Obama--Stimulus Bill Passes the House 

With not a single Republican vote.

Yes, folks, a bipartisan coalition of Representatives voted against the $1.1 trillion (according to yesterday's CBO numbers) "Stimulus Package," but were overridden by the majority Democrats.

Congratulations to Rep. Boehner for holding his Party together to oppose this boondoggle of a legislative act.

Just to give you an idea of where some of the stupidity in this bill is, let me break it down for you:

--$5 billion to ACORN, presumably to its legal defense fund
--$30 billion for transportation projects, even though the federal government is about to "call in" $9 billion that the states have but haven't used yet
--$6 billion for "Higher education modernization." Yep, that's what it says. I have no idea what that means, but . . .

Now, if you just take that money, and instead of creating more government programs, just give it back to people who pay taxes (roughly 138 million), then every taxpayer in the country would receive a check from the Fed for $297. When you add that to the $1000/couple tax cut that is already in the bill, that amounts to a net gain for the taxpayer of roughly $1600/couple. Now that's starting to make stimulative sense.

Then find a way to reduce the cost per job of this bill: if the estimates the Dems have put forward are true, this bill will result in one job per every $223,000 of federal money spent; the private sector creates jobs at a bit less than that. Just a bit.

So let's say the Dems manage to reduce the cost per job created by, oh, I don't know, reducing taxes on businesses, it could reduce the cost per job created to about . . . let's say $100,000.

Doing a little quick math, that ends up being a total of $455 billion (give or take) savings off the program, with substantially the identical results. If you put THAT difference into a check to every taxpayer, that becomes $122,000.

Plus, you know, the $1600 from earlier.

My point is this: on a philosophical level, this is a terrible thing--a running start on the march towards Socialism.

But on a logical level, this is just plain stupid. If a little money in the taxpayers' pockets is a good thing, why not do what you can to reduce governments' debt load AND put a huge amount in the taxpayers' pockets?

I'll tell you what, you put a $100,000 check in my hands, I'll go out and stimulate the economy.
Posted by: Michael / 1/28/2009 11:44:00 PM

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