Pork-ulus, Scam-ulus, Politcs-ulus - it's all ridiculous to me.
I have to break the political silence established on this blog to complain. The politicians are asking for $800 BILLION to spend at their (corrupt) leisure? Are you joking me? Have they shown that they can responsibly spend for us? Arrgghhh!
Here's the breakdown in a couple of ways I find to be enlightening along with some suggestions (that I might not be seen merely as a complainer with no solutions:)
$800 Billion divided by the 1.3 to 3.9 million jobs that will supposedly be created by 2010 by the stimulus equals $205,128 to $615,384 per job created.
Oko...let that sink in for a second. Their worst-case estimate equates to $205,128 to create a job? And that is supposed to stimulate the economy? How about giving that $205,128 per person to the 1.3 million people who would have gotten the jobs? The logic here is that if all those people had a couple hundred thousand in cash in their bank accounts, a couple of things would happen:
1. They would be able to do some serious spending
2. The economic picture for those 1.3 million people would be effectively "stimulated."
Not fair you say for them to get all that $$ while others (perhaps more deserving from a financial perspective) get nothing? Sure, but the current plan spends that same amount creating the jobs (while simultaneously lining the pockets of all the politicians friends) that willl likely pay far less, so what is the better value?
Scenario two, we go all robin hood on it and decide that rather than looking at it in terms of jobs created, we look at it in terms of the general populace for fairness' sake:
$800 Billion divided by the 303,824,640 people estimated to be citizens of this great country equals $2,633.10 for every man, woman and child in the country.
Wow, so my family of 5 would receive a check in the amount of $13,165.50! How much would your family receive? My immediate extended family (ma, pa, sistas and bruddas with their husbands, wives and children) would rake in $63,194.40. A quick check with the census burea indicates that the average household in USA would receive over $7,500. Tell me that wouldn't stimulate this economy? Everyone who is losing a house? Shazaam, here's $5 or $10 grand. Everybody who has a job and is just looking to make the next payment on their boat? Shazaam, here's $5 or $10 grand. Lost some $$ in the stock market? Shazaam, here's $5 or $10 grand. Doing just fine, but could use some spending cash? Shazaam, here's $5 or $10 grand. Tell me that won't stimulate this economy better than giving a huge chunk of money to known corruption (our government pork program.)
You don't like either of the above plans? Not fair enough? Not "robin hood" enough? Let me postulate another option you can't disagree with:
$800 Billion divided by the 75,956,160 households estimated to receive the bottom 1/4 household incomes in this great country equals $10,532.39 for every "poor" household.
The bottom 1/4 of US households in the US bring in less than $22,500 per year according to: Wikipedia
Ok, yes, I probably just excluded myself in this latest pie-slicing, and yes, this does mean that Mississippi would receive a hugely disproportionate amount of the moeny while places around D.C. would receive proportionately less (ironic?) but hey, it is hard to argue that this wouldn't be a more fair way to slice it. The real question is, would it stimulate the economy? You bet your bottom dollar it would! The poor are spread throughout the nation and while they are certainly those who "need" it the most, it could also be argued that they will be those most likely to immediately spend the money on "day to day" types of items that are those same types of items that our economy runs on - thereby pumping much needed funds directly into the channels that most need it to get the economy running again.
Don't like my ideas? What you got? There has to be any number of ways to blow $800 billion that will stimulate the economny better than feeding it to a corrupt politician (or a whole congress/house of them) and letting him channel it to all his rich benefactors.
7 comments:
Dude! I feel ya. Of your plans I think I like the last one the best. You are right, I think that those are the folks that would spend rather than save the $. That was the prob. With the last round of checks.
The thing is that there are some real structural problems with our economy caused be greedy business practices that OUR government allowed. (Bad mortgages, credit default swaps, etc...) Now we are in the boat where we have to take it up the #%&. The question is is it going to be with an economic collapse or trust OUR government to lead us into a lifetime of national debit. It's a tough call but economic collapse is lookin better all the time.
It's a moot point though. We are all about to get stimulated. Right in the you know what.
break the politcal silence on this blog? what political silence? ;)
Mark - nice one - funny.
Angela - OK, I admit it, I may have scratched it a time or two before, but this latest post seems to fall into the full-on rant category, so I figured it was worthy of a warning...
OK - we jsut watched the "O" splain the porkulus and he is adamant that it is not pork and he mentioned that it is "earmark" free (a very good thing) and also provided several project examples from the package that were clearly not pork.
Nevertheless, even if it isn't pork, it certainly is some sort of fatty meat.
I believe that we have 200 years of experience that tells us that we can't trust a politician (or a team of them) to put together a spending package like this and I think it is an insult to the american people to foist this sort of spending on us as the solution.
By the way, I came up with a new way to spend that $800 billion during his speech. If we blew the whole wad on edumacashun (including higher ed and R&D), we would write a special chapter in the history of the USA and might even change the trajectory of the USA's future - all while spending the $800B and injecting it into the economy. I know one thing, the best case scenario with the current porkulus is immediate economic recovery. Why not take a chance on longterm benefits like an edumacashum porkulus?
Wow. Good stuff. I guess one way or another you just can't avoid slopping the hogs, let's just hope they're good for a few slices of bacon come springtime! I also like the third option. The fourth is good, but it assumes a motivated population of youth who are only limited in education by poverty. America's scholastic decline is a cultural problem stemming from laziness, and a sense of entitlement. I know. I dropped out.
hi folks (joe and commentors)
so the stimulus package really is a thousand or so pages, and i've not read it. but since this "crapulus" post was written before the house and senate approved the package, i'm sure you haven't read it either. what is it really about? you can get a decent distilled peek though through this AP article:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jOs-5h-KbakFdM6IXCakYJuV2oPgD96BL2QO0
you want education? the projection is that without intervention, 600,000 teachers will lose their jobs in the next three years. somewhere near a $100 billion goes to education to keep this from happening. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15kristof.html?_r=1
you want money directly to your family? married couples get $800.
you want money for the poor? those on unemployment get taxes waived on the first $2400. those getting foodstamps get more foodstamps.
the unemployed? the government will pay 65% of your COBRA premiums for 9 months (this could be about $5000).
buying a house? get $8000 of the purchase subsidized by the government.
the stimulus is 1000 pages long, and some of the stuff won't matter much to you (unless you're starting a company to deliver clean energy among other things). some of it may not be a great idea. but overall, this is money that's intended to flow to people including each of us to try to counteract the failure of the system around us.
a better target than the stimulus package for your specific criticisms about cronyism would be TARP. it got an amount of money equal to the stimulus that went straight to banks. yeah, that's a lot of money, and we're not seeing much from it. but you know? when the banks fail, businesses fail, families who need to sell their houses can't because even qualified buyers can't get loans (this was the case a few months ago), there is more foreclosure, more layoffs, more chaos, etc.
it's a mess, and there's bound to be some corruption when you start talking in the many hundreds of billions, but it's by no means crap for the government to be working on this.
pay attention to when you get some stimulus bucks and go out for a nice dinner! it's on all of us.
cousin bill
Bill,
Thanks for the comments.
A few thoughts:
1. Regarding having read the package or not. It is an interesting question. According to the following article, there is NO WAY ANYONE COULD HAVE READ IT BEFORE IT PASSED.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/17/cafferty.stimulus/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
Here's a pertinent quote:
"The 1,073-page document wasn't posted on the government's Web site until after 10 p.m. the day before the vote to pass it was taken. I don't care if you're Evelyn Wood, you can't read almost 1,100 pages of the lawyer talk that makes up all legislation in eight or 10 hours."
2. I still hold to my original thought that the amount of money that is being spent here could have been spent in better ways to stimulate the economy. The current package is going to stimulate a few contractors who are already wealthy, squander the taxcuts by diluting them to the point of uselessness, and misdirect the rest of the funds to spending for spending's sake. It is certain that a great deal of good will come from the package...if we throw $800B at ourselves and no good comes from it at all, then we are surely worse off than we thought, but I still feel very confident in claiming that this package is misdirected false-hope-timism at best, government porkulus at worst.
Post a Comment