Thoughts on the Stimulus Bill

Observations from last night's television address by our President on the stimulus bill.

1. He seems to want to push this thing through without debating it much. I heard him say over and over again something like- "We must do SOMETHING. If you say we should do NOTHING, then we are never going to agree. The American people want us to do SOMETHING. We need to get this thing through. etc." It almost seemed like he wanted the Republicans to just fall in line without debate and without discussion and vote for this huge bill.
Uhhh... this is $800 Billion, you know, $100 Billion here and $100 Billion there and you're starting to talk about real money. This is an unprecedented amount of money to spend, and we need to get it right. Waiting a few days or a few weeks is not going to make or break it. Why in the world should we trust the government to spend this money responsibly? If we're going to pass something, which it looks inevitable that we will, we need to hash it out. His efforts to hurriedly push this through makes me nervous.

2. I have heard Obama come down hard on the corporate waste of Banc of America, Merrill Lynch etc., and rightly so. The ferocity of his attacks on them is fine, but for him to turn a blind eye to the Billions and Billions of dollars in pork that are in this barrell is a double standard, the likes of which can hardly be understated. He blasted John Thain for his $2 Million dollar spending spree that he actually paid back, but doesn't care that $650 million of this bill is earmarked for the switch from analog TV to digital, or the $50 million earmarked for the National Endowment for the Arts??? Please...

3. Speaking of pork, this bill has more of it than Hormel. Here is a partial list of the pet projects of the Obama Administration. By publishing this list I'm not saying that OBAMA IS USING THIS BILL AS AN EXCUSE TO PUSH HIS AGENDA!!!! but if he is truly trying to be bipartisan and enacting a new era of governmental responsibility, he is getting off to a terrible start.
Here's the list of some of the projects and their price tag:

$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
$300 million for grants to combat violence against women
$2 billion for federal child-care block grants
$6 billion for university building projects
$15 billion for boosting Pell Grant college scholarships
$4 billion for job-training programs, including $1.2 billion for “youths” up to the age of 24
$1 billion for community-development block grants
$4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities”
$650 million for digital-TV coupons; $90 million to educate “vulnerable populations”
$150 million for the Smithsonian
$34 million to renovate the Department of Commerce headquarters
$500 million for improvement projects for National Institutes of Health facilities
$44 million for repairs to Department of Agriculture headquarters
$350 million for Agriculture Department computers
$88 million to help move the Public Health Service into a new building
$448 million for constructing a new Homeland Security Department headquarters
$600 million to convert the federal auto fleet to hybrids
$450 million for NASA (carve-out for “climate-research missions”)
$600 million for NOAA (carve-out for “climate modeling”)
$1 billion for the Census Bureau
$4.5 billion for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
$850 million for Amtrak
$87 million for a polar icebreaking ship
$1.7 billion for the National Park System
$55 million for Historic Preservation Fund
$7.6 billion for “rural community advancement programs”
$150 million for agricultural-commodity purchases
$150 million for “producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish”
$79 billion for State Fiscal Stabilization Fund

By listing these I'm not saying that all of these things are bad, but this is a stimulus bill, not a "fund your pet project bill." It is supposed to create jobs, not fund Pell Grants, and fund poor artists who take pictures of crucifixes upside down in glasses of urine.

That last item, the $79 Billion dollar State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, goes to balance the budgets of states who have spent money like crazy. Basically they are taxing the fiscally responsible states and giving money to the states that spend money like John Edwards in a beauty salon. Hmmm... now which states are in financial ruin? California is the worst offender along with other left leaning states.

4. He said something like "I'm not going to take any lip about fiscal irresponsibility off of a bunch of people who Presided over the largest budget deficits in the history of mankind." As if to say "Our fiscal irresponsibility is excused by their fiscal irresponsibility." They wasted no time in balancing the books on that perceived inequity. We are set to have a $1 Trillion dollar deficit this year, which dwarfs any of Bush's deficits. It's as though I was at a strip club, pointing to the guys leering at the Victoria's Secret store to excuse my lap dance... give me a break.

5. Finally, the economics behind the proposition that spending massive amounts of money is suspect at best. I doubt even Keynes would agree that this is what we need to do in this case. Obama said that the party of spending is "over." I guess he meant after this one last party.

Needless to say, I don't think this stimulus bill is a responsible way to accomplish what they are trying to accomplish. It looks more like an effort to push an agenda. I hope I'm wrong but this is likely to either prolong the recession we are in or at least retard the rebound that is likely to happen soon. The market may recover, but I doubt it will have much to do with this bill. One reason they may want this bill to be pushed through is so that they can take responsibility for the recovery, and they will have been able to push through their spending projects. I hope I'm wrong about Obama on this and that he gets out his line item veto pen cutting hundreds of billions from this bill. I put that likelihood at about 15%.