$787 billion dollars
What all is included in the Stimulus Package?
Now that Congress has passed the $787 billion dollar Economic Stimulus Bill, many people are taking a closer look at just what’s inside it and wonder if “Barack Obama’s Payday Loan for America” wouldn’t have been a more apt name. There’s already been considerable wrangling about all the questionable projects being funded by the plan under the guise of job creation. Opponents have labeled it as a pork laden waste of taxpayer money. Some have even gone so far as to label it the equivalent of a very ill advised national payday loan.
Short-term Solutions for Long-term Problems?
As most people know, payday loans represent a great solution to a minor, temporary cash shortage. However, using a payday loan simply to acquire more cash and continuing to spend irresponsibly is neither the intended purpose of payday loans nor a good use of them. The stimulus bill has raised many eyebrows among those that have read the actual expenditures, because in many ways it represents the latter description.
Change America Really Wanted To Believe In
It wasn’t very long ago at all that Barack Obama appealed to the voters’ desire to turn the page on the Bush administration and rode a wave of reformist sentiment straight into the White House. Promising change and inspiring hope among a citizenry that had endured eight years of divisive politics capped off by an economic collapse that hadn’t been witnessed since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, Obama was an easy sell to the American public. Seemingly, the days of payday loans and cash advances for working class America would soon be ending.
A Ban on Earmarks
Amid much fanfare, one of Barack Obama’s first acts after being inaugurated as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America was to issue a presidential order that banned the inclusion of any earmarks in the stimulus bill that he had proposed during his time as President-elect. Not surprisingly, this was greeted as warmly as a payday loan in the final week of a thirty one day month. In recent years, earmarks had become the symbol of governmental excess and unbridled spending on Capitol Hill, with the “Bridge to Nowhere” becoming a rallying cry for fiscal conservatives and watchdog groups.
Free of Earmarks or One Large Earmark?
Problem is, it soon become apparent that this ban had a lot more bark than actual bite. Earmarks weren’t required for this bill because the pork and wasteful spending was built right into it. Once again, Congress was free to spend like a drunken sailor on his way home from cashing his first payday loan check. Shockingly, only approximately ninety billion of the 787 billion dollars in the so-called stimulus bill will actually fund programs that could potentially generate new jobs for America.
More of the Same Bad Medicine
When you delve into the particulars of what is inside this bill, it’s really no wonder that Republicans have decried it as a pork laden example of the type of wasteful spending that brought us to the economic situation we so precariously occupy, currently. The analogy of this stimulus bill being much like a nationwide payday loan is not at all inappropriate, being that the intention of this bill is to create a temporary infusion of cash into the economy. Unfortunately for America, the politicians in charge of our collective budget don’t seem be willing to act like responsible borrowers and curtail their excessive spending. Instead, they seem bent on continuing the failed policies that got us to where they needed to ask the taxpayers for a “payday loan” in the first place.
The bill is most certainly laden with a lot of spending that maybe we should have waited on, and the amount dedicated to job generation pales in comparison to the rest of the spending items on the bill, but that being said, if the amount creates a few million jobs for an economical amount..good! Ideally, we’d want these jobs to be created in the private sector, but if people can get work, they should get work.
I wouldn’t disagree if I actually thought the billions being spent were going to create jobs. I just think it’s more of the same kind of policy that wrecked the economy in the first place. And just like before, at best it will provide a little temporary relief, followed by an even larger crash.
I appreciate your comment BTW Peter.