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Blogs by Michael J Hayutin
Disingenuous and Regrettable 2/16/2009 4:54:39 PM
Stimulus bill fraud What a horrible way to take partisan advantage of a massive financial crisis! Speaker Nancy Pelosi authored legislation as artificial as her current visage. She and her allies have exploited President Obama’s victory by misappropriating his pledge of “change” and “hope” to their cynical advantage. The “stimulus” package they have passed includes a laundry list of Democrat pet spending programs. By so doing they bypass the “pay as you go” rules and proceed to submerge America in debt. They are spending billions of borrowed dollars on pet programs that will do little to stem our financial crisis. This could not be a more emblematic of the “old politics” that our new President was elected to end. Someone forget to inform our illustrious Speaker and her allies. Our new President has just bet his future on Pelosi style politics. Partisan spending in enormous amounts that will be poorly tracked and extremely wasteful was the pattern we were supposed to break.
The package of bloat offered is both dishonest and largely non stimulative as well as harmful because it explodes our debt. This bill is the poster child for government by special interest. It is particularly dangerous because time is of the essence. More than 1000 pages was slapped together filled with billions dedicated to every program and project Pelosi et al has wanted to pass for years. We can be very confident that few if any of those in the House who voted for it actually read it. Congressman and Senators sanctimoniously go before cameras pretending to have put forth a genuine attempt at stimulus and recovery. If the average American would read just a few pages of this monstrosity they would be furious. Any attempt to put this jumbled set of disparate and unrelated causes into effect will surely be both wasteful and prime territory for corruption. This is how we attack a crisis? Just consider the possibility of crafting 1000 pages of anything sensible and effective in a couple of weeks. Putting aside partisanship, an effective and targeted bill of this magnitude can not be crafted and properly scrutinized in 2 weeks.
Do we dare burden our children and grandchildren with such debt for no good reason? The massive debt can only be rationalized if it is used to stem the tide of a collapsed credit system and crisis of confidence. American’s confidence in recovery will drop to new lows if this outrage is exposed for what it is.
President Obama’s key economic advisor Lawrence Summers set out 3 critical criteria that must apply to all elements of the stimulus package. First the impact must be immediate. Any program or project that will take months or years to implement should not be put into this legislation. Secondly it must target help for those who are most negatively impacted by our financial melt down. And thirdly no money should be spent on projects or programs that would negatively affect the deficit for more than one year. Based on the President’s economic advisors criteria most of this bill fails miserably. Examples include: 400 million for sexually transmitted disease prevention programs, 50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, 800 million for Amtrak, 400 million for NASA to study global warming, 10 million for the criminally implicated and partisan Acorn, 137 billion for 32 new government programs (once started next to impossible to end), billions for a rail line from L.A. to Las Vegas, money for 600,000 new federal employees and the list goes on and on. A retrenchment of the single most effective legislation of the last two decade, welfare reform, is included. Federal interference in doctor patient treatment choices is included. With no real exposure or debate item after item that has nothing to do with the credit crisis has been thrown into this legislation. If this money is monitored and managed like most federal spending then we have just initiated the biggest waste of tax payer money and unnecessary debt in history.
I urge everyone to examine the projects and programs thrown into this bill. Write your representatives and scold them like misbehaving children if they voted in support of this grand deception. At a time when Republicans are willing to support genuine stimulus, a power crazed majority ignores our President’s electioneering call for change by falling right back into the kind of partisanship that repulses most Americans. If I am wrong and President Obama was in on the creation of this monster then I hate to say it but his campaign was a fraud.
