Spending Spree - Who is being helped?

Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's Chief of Staff, told the Wall Street Journal that, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

His remark tells me the current "crisis" is an opportunity for Democrats to further their agenda of party dominance in the US government, but little else. The major redistribution of wealth that is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (H.R. 1) is the opportunity that Democrats are not wasting. But some big questions come to mind:

Will it create jobs?
Will it jump start the economy?
Will this recession last as as long as Hoover/FDR's Great Depression lasted?
If not this, what will really help?

Creating jobs.

H.R. One commits $787,000,000,000.00 to "create" about 3,000,000 jobs according to President Obama's sales force. Doing the math, they would spend $275,000.00 for each job.

Who believes this is some sort of bargain? Or that it will help the economy? I'll bet the private sector could do it for much much less.

You'd have to read all 647 pages of H.R. 1 to find out who is receiving it and you would still need an interpreter to figure it out. Here is a partial list from Fox News.

$25 million for new ATV trails
$400 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
$400 million for global warming research
$335 million for the Centers for Disease Control to combat sexually-transmitted diseases
$650 million coupons to subsidize TV viewers for digital television conversion

From eWeek:
$40 billion plus into areas that have been on the technology sector's wish list, including:
$6 billion for broadband build-outs
$20 billion for health IT initiatives
$11 billion to modernize the United States' electrical grid
$2 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy R&D

Many of these sound good, some are extremely bad (IMHO), and all have little to do with putting people back to work. Some of them are continuations of bad policy and wasteful government spending and interference. Most of them put people to work but only until that particular job is finished. The government cannot continue manufacturing short term make-work jobs. Eventually even the government will run out of credit and be unable to pay for more jobs. That's why it's best to let market forces and those with experience in creating jobs to do so unencumbered by government over-regulation and taxes.

The renewable energy (ethanol) spending is especially egregious. It uses tax dollars, taken from people who are working, to artificially manufacture ethanol which increases the cost of food, transporting virtually anything, and gasoline prices, while reducing a vehicle's actual mileage by 10-15%. Moreover, it does nothing, zero, to reduce the much feared atmospheric CO2. This amounts to paying extra to spend more while being lectured to save. Read about it.

Besides, $787 Billion in new "Hope dollars" or unfunded spending doesn't look like saving to me.

Jump Start?

For the infrastructure spending, only $136,000,000,000.00 of the $335,000,000,000.00 they want to spend will be spent over the next 2 years. You know, I thought we had a crisis NOW. Well, so much for a "jump start".

H.R. 1 is the Democratic Party's attempt at a industry takeover. It will be corporate welfare on steroids and amounts to government dependency by so-called private industry. This seems to be the president's most likely goal.

Why would Democrats want to do that? The answer is easy. Too easy.

When tens of thousands of companies become dependent on the government's continued monetary largess, they will:

1. To ensure that Democrats get reelected. Everyone believes they know the Republicans would try and cut off the spigot. This is essentially the "Make the Republicans the Minority Party Forever Act". Democrats and their willing accomplices in the legacy media already have their supporters convinced that Republicans and conservatives are greedy, warmongering, controlling, uncaring, rich racists. Of course it is a total lie, but you cannot convince Democrats of this.

2. Be required to follow the edicts of government bureaucrats or loose the subsidies.This method has worked with local school districts for decades and is how the federal government was able to force local school districts into adopting the FCAT test requirements and other agenda driven ideas.. The new president has already required the capping of CEO salaries if they receive his hope dollars.

Republicans need to wise up and confront the legacy media and their "friends across the isle" with the truth of this nonsense.

Another Great Depression?

Hard to say with certainty, but Obama's tax and spend plan sure looks like deja vu all over again. The entire fiasco appears to be the second largest scam ever to be perpetrated on the American public. The first being the "New Deal" that accomplished the opposite of its intended purpose and actually prolonged the Great Depression. A quick check will show that the unemployment rates were steadily in double digits for FDR's entire reign.

Now President Obama wants us to buy stocks. I'll just bet he does. The market has lost another 15% since he took the oath and it doesn't look like it's going to improve anytime soon. Although that might help, who has the money to spare?

Real Help

If the President and his congress want to do really help Americans get back to work and jump start the economy, he only needs to cut taxes. Income taxes, corporate taxes and capital gains taxes, then make them permanent. It worked for Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and Bush. This would do more than anything else to correct our economy and increase federal revenue in the long run.

So why wouldn't he? Well, it just seems that Democrats abhor tax cuts. Tax cuts translate to less influence to them.

He also should stop talking down the economy (for political leverage) and give up on the left's policy of class warfare. People who make over $250K are not the enemy.

"Ohhh, but the government will lose funding for programs that people need."

The president and congress have already decided that deficit spending is not a problem, so tax cuts that would initially reduce federal revenue is not a fiscal problem and won't affect their precious programs.

There you have it. This looks very much like a "crisis" orchestrated by congressional Democrats to squeeze as much out of the working class as possible. Then, of course, they stand up to "fix" it with unimagined spending while blaming it all on the the previous administration, deregulation and tax cuts. It appears that to their way of thinking this crisis is the path to Democratic domination of the US government for decades to come.