Round-up on pork in stimulus
Bearing Drift has the best wrap-up I’ve seen on the Great American Spendfest of Ought Nine the Stimulus package and some of the “highlights” therein:
Only 3.6% of this spending is for the famed highway infrastructure that we need so badly. Heck, split that evenly over the states (which they won’t) and we in Virginia wouldn’t even get what we need to cover the shortfall in our Transportation Trust Fund.
The jobs they are talking about creating — well, read the fine print. If this package goes through, each job will cost $210,000. Yep, that’s money out of the pockets of people who have jobs and are paying taxes. And, guess what the average taxpayer makes – just $45,000 / year. Is that really a good deal?
Some other highlights:
$50 million to increase staff at the Student Aid Administration $79 billion to bail out states (like New York & California) that have run up massive deficits and driven taxpayers and businesses away. Mind you, the total projected budget deficit for all states in FY09 is $43 billion. $2.1 billion for Head Start $50 million to the National Endowment for the Arts to make sure the recession doesn’t hurt all those starving non-profit artists. I’m not anti-art, but what makes these jobs so much more valuable than, say, jobs in the homebuilding industry? $400 million for NASA climate change research $88 million to lease a new headquarters for the Public Health Service $245 million to modernize computer systems at the Farm Service Agency (note, this is while recent legislation authorizing the National Animal ID System is putting small farmers out of business) $800 million for Amtrak — which is always losing money and this won’t make things one iota better for the rail carrier
5. The plan establishes at least 32 new government programs at a cost of over $136 billion. That means more than a third of this plan’s spending provisions are dedicated to creating new government programs.
6. The plan provides spending in at least 150 different federal programs, ranging from Amtrak to the Transportation Security Administration. Is this the “targeted” plan Democratic leaders promised?
7. Even though the legislation contains at least 152 separate spending proposals, the authors of the plan can only say that 34 have any chance at keeping or growing jobs.
8. Just one in seven dollars of an $18.5 billion expenditure on “energy efficiency” and “renewable energy programs” would be spent within the next 18 months.
