- $825 Billion, and Not One Job May Result – HUMAN EVENTSAre you sorry yet?tags: politics
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“Can you tell me Mr. Barthold, how many jobs will be created as a result of this legislation?” Camp asked. Barthold replied, “In short, Mr. Camp, I can’t.” Camp then pressed Barthold to clarify his position, “So we don’t have an estimate of the number of jobs this would create either private sector or public? We don’t have any estimate of the economic effect that this legislation would have on our economy, whether it would create any growth in our economy at all? We don’t have that data before the committee today?” Barthold then nodded his head and shrugged.
The Democrat “stimulus” bill — a bill that was created behind closed doors by Democrat leadership who usurped the normal committee process — reaches nearly a trillion dollars in spending, and the non-partisan analysts cannot guarantee that this $825 billion in proposed legislation would create one single job.
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- Charles Krauthammer – The Fierce Urgency of PorkAn excellent essay on what is going on with the Porkulus project bill – are you sorry now for voting for this guy?tags: obama, politics
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“A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.“— President Obama, Feb. 4.Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared “we have chosen hope over fear.” Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
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And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn’t understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.
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And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
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It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
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The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting “planted” for “ready to market” would mean a windfall garnered from a new “bonus depreciation” incentive.After Obama’s miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell — and that this president told better than anyone.I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.
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