Payday won’t come for these causes
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Many causes that need loans won’t see a payday from the government from the economic stimulus package. You can see the full list of items that got cut here at CNN.com. I have chosen to write about a few items that deserve special attention, for one reason or another.
The recurring theme among the cuts seems to be that Congress realized they can’t just fold in causes that have nothing to do with stimulating the economy.
Historic Preservation
Previously, the bill contained an item that would give a big payday to historic preservation. A $55 million payday to be exact. I can’t say that I know what the money was going to fund, exactly. Much historic preservation mostly involves leaving things alone. But I can say that there isn’t a correlation between historic preservation and improving the economy.
The historic preservation money was a good example of spending money and not getting anything back for it. Payday loans are a good example of another time when you should only spend the money if it will save you money or make you money.
School Nutrition and Distance Learning
Many items in the economic stimulus package were geared toward subsidizing education and programs related to education. The bill dedicated $98 million to school nutrition. That’s a very good cause, and investing in our future, specifically children, is always a good idea. However, this item belongs in a different bill. The Congress members gunning for this item couldn’t present a satisfactory argument for how it would aid the economy.
Another education related item was $100 million for distance learning. I think it’s a shame this one got cut. It is common knowledge that people with more education make more money, so this item could have helped the economy. People who make more money spend more money.
General Services Administration
Another big cut was the $4.5 billion for a government organization called General Services Administration. According to the GSA web site:
GSA provides workplaces by constructing, managing, and preserving government buildings and by leasing and managing commercial real estate.
It seems to me like helping this organization could have helped achieve one of the main goals of the stimulus package: to create jobs. I hope we will see more explanation on why Congress chose to make the cuts that it did. There was another $89 million dedicated to ”General Services Administration operations,” so clearly, at some point, Congress members considered this a very worthy cause.
Neighborhood stabilization
According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the purpose of neighborhood stabilization is “to acquire and redevelop foreclosed properties that might otherwise become sources of abandonment and blight within their communities.”
Clearly this item should be part of the Trouble Asset Relief Program. The housing crisis and the recession go hand in hand, but because we have already dedicated $700 billion to aiding the housing crisis, this economic stimulus package should focus on other things. There is a lot of funding left in the TARP, so if Congress wants to fund the housing market, the money should come out of there.
Several other programs won’t be getting loans or a payday from the economic stimulus package, and you can check out the list and leave comments if you have opinions on any of them.
If you don’t know what the money would be going for, then it is premature to condemn the funding.
The Historic Preservation funds would have created as many as 15,000 jobs across the country doing restoration work on projects that have already passed the required NEPA and Section 106 reviews. The money could have been obligated within 3 months with hammers hitting nails within 5. The jobs that would have been created would have been for skilled workers, in projects that have been demonstrated to contribute measurably to local economies.
Anything that could create more jobs should be a focus. Constant money won’t flow in the economic system when there’s no money to begin with. People are not going to go out and spend money they don’t have. How can people avoid foreclosure (and other relating topics) when they have no job to create the money to catch up or at least maintain their payments? What annoys me about this is how it this all started in the first place. Instead of making smart, fast moves in square one, these government officials decided to reward the very ones who made the major financial risks, which the nation is currently suffering from. After wasting billions of dollars, they are finally trying to fix the problem. The problem is they are not only trying to stabilize the financial system, but must also put in a lot more effort just to catch up.
Wow – they cut out portions of a stimulus bill that is supposed to help create more jobs that would have created jobs? Not the greatest move on their part. I do agree that some portions of the bill should have been on separate bills, and they should definitely bring back the measures that involve education. The public school system is in dire need of an overhaul.