Stimulus or social welfare

[DOGS THAT BARK]

Wayne: I pay taxes and I got a couple of Bush's rebate checks. I really don't know what the hell you are talking about. My problem with your posts is that it seems the messenger is more important than the message. The only facts you like are the ones that your the right wing media is sending your way.

Sorry if I wasn't clear Garry

on rebates under GW --I believe they were confined to taxpayors--and actual "rebates"
under O's- those who paid no taxes will be getting what he incorrectly defines as rebates--but are basically handouts at taxpayors expense.

On my right wing media--
Much of my post on this issue (as one above) are from financial media--that are brought forth by those concerned of financial consequences of this bill.
Check you mainstream media today (AP NYT Reuters) and they are all the same--stating only that REBs are opposing bill but you won't see any reasons why (pork and social programs inside bill).
My question to you-how on earth can people who read only mainstream media have a clue what is really going on?
O Harped on transparency-
"Every American has the right to know how the government spends their tax dollars, but for too long that information has been largely hidden from public view," Obama said then.

yet he and his media promoters what to promte this as stimulus--when "facts" show very little goes to stimulus.
--O went as far as to say he he would up site (per transparency) recovery.gov --lets see what he's got for us concerning this most monumental bill on site.

"check back with us after the passage of the American Recovery and investment Act to see how your tax dollars are spent"

WOW--Must be where mainstream media is getting their details.

The fact of the matter Garry--if not for those that checked into this plan and reported it's contents (call them right wing media if you will) Americans would be clueless to socialistic/income redistribution bulk of this bill.

Huge portion of this is your and my tax dollar bailing out liberal states because their budgets on their welfare follies are insolvent--so we have to pay for their irrational convictions--don't know about you-but I'm pissed and I can and will limit my contributions to their nanny state agenda.

 

[DOGS THAT BARK]

--and let me add his most recent rhetoric just out this morning--

"And we will insist on unprecedented transparency, rigorous oversight and clear accountability so taxpayers know how their money is being spent and whether it is achieving results."

 

[saint]

..................................................................

How did we know Clinton was going to be brought up.

talk about living in the past

Yeah like you won't be bringing bush up for the next ten years

 

[THE KOD]

Yeah like you won't be bringing bush up for the next ten years

.................................................................

yeh but I cant get over Bush in two weeks.

dtb will hound slick willy to his grave.

 

[Terryray]

Left wing is excited by lack of "stimulus" in package

Left wing is excited by lack of "stimulus" in package

Nice piece here by Palast expressing the celebration among many lefties (oops! "progressives") about the fact that Obama stuck in his stimulus bill lottsa welfare, nanny state, income redistribution and general goverment-expansion spending:


Obama Is a Two-Faced Liar. Aw-RIGHT!

Friday 30 January 2009

by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn't give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as "tax refunds," and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin' man. Covering over his break-your-face power play with a "we're all post-partisan friends" BS.

And it's about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama's appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as "Economics Czar," made me fear for my country, that we'd gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.

Then came Obama's money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It's as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan's carcass and put a stake through The Gipper's anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter, to pay for their own protection. S'OK with me.

And here's the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican congressman voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn't compromise, the way Clinton and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn't need'm. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama's weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say, it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama's "post-partisanship." Heh heh heh.

Love it. Now we know why Obama picked that vindictive little viper Rahm Emanuel as staff chief: everyone visiting the Oval office will be greeted by the Windy City hit man who would hack up your grandma if you mess with the Godfather-in-Chief.

I don't know about you, but THIS is the change I've been waiting for.

Will it last? We'll see if Obama caves in to more tax cuts to investment bankers. We'll see if he stops the sub-prime scum-bags from foreclosing on frightened families. We'll see if he stands up to the whining, gormless generals who don't know how to get our troops out of Iraq. (In SHIPS, you doofuses!)

Look, don't get your hopes up. But it may turn out the new president's ... a Democrat!

-------

Greg Palast's investigative reports for BBC and Rolling Stone can be seen at GregPalast.com. Palast is the author of New York Times bestsellers "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and "Armed Madhouse."

 

[DOGS THAT BARK]

Good one Terry

--Ben Stein on subject

By BEN STEIN


I LOVE this. The new kind of politics of hope. Eight hours of debate in the House of Representatives to pass a bill spending $820 billion - or roughly $102 billion per hour of debate.

Only 10 percent of the "stimulus" to be spent on 2009.

Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ (or both) members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions or other Democrat-controlled unions.
This bill is sent to Congress after President Obama has been in office for seven days. It is 680 pages long. According to my calculations, not one member of Congress read the entire bill before this vote. Obviously, it would have been impossible, given his schedule, for the president to have read the whole thing.

For the amount spent, we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000.

We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly $300,000.

There has been pork-barrel politics since there has been politics, but the scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been imagined before - and no one can be sure it will actually do much stimulation.

Further, no one can be sure that we are not already at the trough of the recession - such that this money will be spent mostly after the recovery is well under way.

How long until the debt incurred under this program is so immense that it causes a downgrade in the nation's sovereign debt? What happens to us then?

This has been a punch in the solar plexus to the kind of responsible, far-seeing, mature government processes that are needed to protect America. This is more than pork-barrel - this is a coup for the constituencies of the party in power and against the idea of a responsible government itself. A bleak day.
Unfortunately, it is only the latest in a long series of such days stretching across decades of rule by both parties, to the point where truly responsible government is only a distant echo of our forgotten ancestors.

 

[DOGS THAT BARK]

Oh Shit--even NYT climbing on now:scared


Cleaner and Faster
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 29, 2009
Throughout 2008, Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, built the case for a big but surgical stimulus package. Summers warned that a ?poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured.? So his proposal had three clear guidelines.

First, the stimulus should be timely. The money should go out ?almost immediately.? Second, it should be targeted. It should help low- and middle-income people. Third, it should be temporary. Stimulus measures should not raise the deficits ?beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two.?

Summers was proposing bold action, but his concept came with safeguards: focus on the task at hand, prevent the usual Washington splurge and limit long-term fiscal damage.

Now Barack Obama is president, and Summers has become a top economic adviser. Yet the stimulus approach that has emerged on Capitol Hill abandoned the Summers parameters.

In a fateful decision, Democratic leaders merged the temporary stimulus measure with their permanent domestic agenda ? including big increases for Pell Grants, alternative energy subsidies and health and entitlement spending. The resulting package is part temporary and part permanent, part timely and part untimely, part targeted and part untargeted.

It?s easy to see why Democrats decided to do this. They could rush through permanent policies they believe in. Plus, they could pay for them with borrowed money. By putting a little of everything in the stimulus package, they avoid the pay-as-you-go rules that might otherwise apply to recurring costs.
But they?ve created a sprawling, undisciplined smorgasbord, which has spun off a series of unintended consequences. First, by trying to do everything all it once, the bill does nothing well. The money spent on long-term domestic programs means there may not be enough to jolt the economy now (about $290 billion in spending is pushed off into 2011 and later). The money spent on stimulus, meanwhile, means there?s not enough to truly reform domestic programs like health technology, schools and infrastructure. The measure mostly pumps more money into old arrangements.

Second, by pumping so much money through government programs, the bill unleashes a tidal wave on state governments. A governor with a few-hundred-million-dollar shortfall will suddenly have to administer an additional $4 billion or $5 billion. That money will be corrosive both when washing in, and when it disappears in a few years time.

Third, the muddle assures ideological confrontation. A stimulus package was always going to be controversial, because economists differ widely about whether or how a stimulus can work. But this bill also permanently alters the role of the federal government, thus guaranteeing a polarizing brawl at the very start of the Obama presidency.

Fourth, Summers?s warnings about deficits have been put aside. There is no fiscal exit strategy. Instead, permanent spending commitments are entailed with no permanent funding stream to pay for them.

Fifth, new government expenditures on complex matters are being designed on a hasty, reckless timetable. As readers may know, the policy I am most passionate about is pre-K education. Yet I fervently hope that the Head Start expansion is dropped from this bill. A slapdash and shambolic expansion could discredit the whole idea.

Wise heads are now trying to restore structure and safeguards to the enterprise. In testimony this week, Alice Rivlin, Bill Clinton?s former budget director, raised the possibility of separating the temporary from the permanent measures and focusing independently on each. ?A long-term investment program should not be put together hastily and lumped in with the anti-recession package,? Rivlin testified. ?The elements of the investment program must be carefully planned and will not create many jobs right away.?

The best course is to return to the original Summers parameters ? temporary, targeted and timely ? thus making the stimulus cleaner and faster.

Strip out the permanent government programs. Many of them are worthy, but we can have that debate another day. Make the short-term stimulus bigger. Many liberal economists have been complaining it is too small, so replace the permanent programs with something like a big payroll tax cut, which would help the working class.

Add in a fiscal exit strategy so the whole thing is budget neutral over the medium term. Finally, coordinate the stimulus package with plans to shore up the housing and financial markets. Until those come to life, no amount of stimulus will do any good.

This recession is scary and complicated. It?s insane to try to tackle it and dozens of other complicated problems, all in one piece of legislation. Leadership involves prioritizing. Those who try to do everything at once will end up with a sprawling, lobbyist-driven mess that does nothing well.

 

[StevieD]

Hey DTB you wanna answer my posts about Bush and home ownership or are you just going to ignore them and then lie about how people don't answer your posts when faced with the "facts" you present from some Right Wing Blog. :142smilie :142smilie

 

[gardenweasel]

i hope they don`t veto that new "ferret park " slated for dover downs....

 

[StevieD]

i hope they don`t veto that new "ferret park " slated for dover downs....

Weasel, my Neocon friend! Want to comment on Bush's stand on home ownership?:scared

 

[gardenweasel]

Weasel, my Neocon friend! Want to comment on Bush's stand on home ownership?:scared

not sure where you`re goin` steven.....but i`ll take a wild guess and say that bush thinks that if you can afford 20% down and can make your payments without a gov`t handout(i.e.outside of freddie/fanniemae)then knock yourself out......

am i close?...

 

[StevieD]

not sure where you`re goin` steven.....but i`ll take a wild guess and say that bush thinks that if you can afford 20% down and can make your payments without a gov`t handout(i.e.outside of freddie/fanniemae)then knock yourself out......

am i close?...

Not even in the ball park. Check around the 5 minutemark where he talks about making mortgages availible to people with bad credit.

 

[The Sponge]

Nice piece here by Palast expressing the celebration among many lefties (oops! "progressives") about the fact that Obama stuck in his stimulus bill lottsa welfare, nanny state, income redistribution and general goverment-expansion spending:


Obama Is a Two-Faced Liar. Aw-RIGHT!

Friday 30 January 2009

by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn't give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as "tax refunds," and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin' man. Covering over his break-your-face power play with a "we're all post-partisan friends" BS.

And it's about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama's appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as "Economics Czar," made me fear for my country, that we'd gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.

Then came Obama's money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It's as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan's carcass and put a stake through The Gipper's anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter, to pay for their own protection. S'OK with me.

And here's the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican congressman voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn't compromise, the way Clinton and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn't need'm. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama's weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say, it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama's "post-partisanship." Heh heh heh.

Love it. Now we know why Obama picked that vindictive little viper Rahm Emanuel as staff chief: everyone visiting the Oval office will be greeted by the Windy City hit man who would hack up your grandma if you mess with the Godfather-in-Chief.

I don't know about you, but THIS is the change I've been waiting for.

Will it last? We'll see if Obama caves in to more tax cuts to investment bankers. We'll see if he stops the sub-prime scum-bags from foreclosing on frightened families. We'll see if he stands up to the whining, gormless generals who don't know how to get our troops out of Iraq. (In SHIPS, you doofuses!)

Look, don't get your hopes up. But it may turn out the new president's ... a Democrat!

-------

Greg Palast's investigative reports for BBC and Rolling Stone can be seen at GregPalast.com. Palast is the author of New York Times bestsellers "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and "Armed Madhouse."

Kinda strange that all the articles about Bush By Palast about Bush and his cronies out and out thievery of this country and not once did i ever see u post one article by Palast. Have you just become a fan of Palast? What has changed?