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Obama’s planned “economic stimulus” passed in the House today by a 244-188 vote. There is, as with all political and economic news these days, a good and a bad to this announcement.
Above all else, if you have not reviewed the actual appropriations of Obama’s plan, I absolutely recommend doing so. After all, this set of economic shock treatments will likely cost each American taxpayer around $6700 in the long run - this number is, of course, in 2009 money, which will shortly be devalued if Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have their say, running the presses non-stop to cover endless government and private bailouts.
Full disclosure of the stimulus in actual dollar figures suggested by the committee may be found here and here. Warning: the contents of this bill are not pretty. Reading of this bill may cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, and vertigo. The pork is overwhelming and feels an awful lot like a giant government bailout. We have been down this road before (Citigroup, anyone?) and the scenery is certainly not entirely unfamiliar.
It is disgusting that this bill passed at all. Beyond that, it is sickening that our new President and Congress chose this as the hallmark of the new administration. Way to kick things off with this bloated joke of a bill, passing a government makeover at the taxpayers’ expense off as a stimulus to rebuild the broken economy which has damaged so many of those selfsame taxpayers.
The good? Not a single Republican in the House voted yea. It shows a strength and unity that the party has been desperate to formulate in recent years; could it be that Conservatives have once and for all learned that we are greater than the sum of our parts?
The bad? The Democrats still got their way.
It is a frightening reflection of the divide we now have to fight against; even when every single one of our conservative representatives in D.C. stand against a self-indulgent joke of a bill such as Obama’s stimulus, we are still defeated by the Spendmores on the other side of the aisle. That is a more frightening realization than the bill itself.
There is a healthy way to stimulate our floundering economy. This, my friends, is not it.
