The Sky is Falling or What another Bailout? 

All 1,434 pages of the porkulus conference report; Detailed spending tables added

A couple weeks ago, Howard Portnoy asked that all-important question at Hot Air's Greenroom:

From the beginning, it was well established that the president had not gotten his hands all ink-stained writing the so-called American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill. In fact, it was pretty much common knowledge that Nancy Pelosi and her minions authored the bill, right? (Well, her minions maybe; I doubt Pelosi can find her way upstairs without a map, much less author a piece of complex legislation.)

Certainly, that's what I myself believed until yesterday when Glenn Beck ... asked an intriguing question: How has Congress managed to crank out several thousand pages of legislation in the space of several months? This is Congress, mind you. We of the electorate are lucky when 60 percent of them shows up for work on a given day.

Beck raises the possibility that Congress had help — and not in the form of Cliff Notes. Take a look at this press release dated January 15, 2009. It appears on the website of the Apollo Alliance, whose mission statement identifies it as "a coalition of labor, business, environmental, and community leaders working to catalyze a clean energy revolution that will put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of high-quality, green-collar jobs." N.B. Community leaders in this context is code for "community organizers" (why does that phrase sound familiar?). And revolution in this context is code for "community organizers sticking it to the man."

The press release, which contains highlights of the newly proposed stimulus package, also contains the following paragraph:

Almost all of the clean energy, good jobs programs made public today, along with the dimension of the spending called for by Congress and the new president, track closely with the ideas and proposals advanced last year by the Apollo Alliance in The New Apollo Program and the Apollo Economic Recovery Act. [Emphasis added.]

Could it be that the 1,200-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill, written prior to Obama's inauguration, is actually cribbed from the Apollo Economic Recovery Act? If so, does that also hold true for the administration's cap and trade energy bill, which has already passed in the House?

Lest there be any doubt, Obama has ties to the Apollo Initiative. Van Jones, the man he appointed Green Jobs Czar, is a co-founder and director of the Apollo Alliance. He is also a black nationalist, former terrorist, ex-con, and self-avowed Nazi communist (though presumably all of this occurred when Obama was 8, so it doesn't count).

If you're trying to place where you've heard the name Apollo before, it was right here in Glenn Beck's recent TV segment connecting all of Barack Obama's radical associations.  If you didn't catch it the first time around, or if you don't recall the details, make time to watch it again.

Fast forward to today.  Van Jones has been ousted as the radical anti-American he is.  And now we see...this:

New Zeal reported last month that Van Jones helped found Apollo and served on its board until recently-alongside Gerry Hudson of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) supporter Carl Pope and Joel Rogers-founder of the radical New Party-which Barack Obama joined in Chicago in 1995.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently credited Apollo with helping write the stimulus bill and getting it passed. Yet the stimulus' "green jobs" provisions funnel federal tax dollars to unions, green groups and community organizers -- that is, the organizations that make up Apollo.

But the connections don't stop there:

The New York state Apollo Alliance Director is Jeff Jones.
Jones co-founded the Weatherman terrorist organization with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Jeff Jones is a former member of the 1970s terrorist organization, the Weather Underground. More than that, Jones was a founder and one of four key leaders of the organization with Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. (New Zeal)

I'm sure you'll recall that Barack Obama launched his bid for President with a fundraiser in Ayers' home.  And they're all still in bed together:

VAN Jones resigned as White House green-jobs czar after the public got a look at his history of radical activism, including his time building the so-called Apollo Alliance -- a coalition of left-wing interest groups unified around the green-jobs concept. But another, even more radical Jones (not related) is leading Apollo's New York state activities.

Jeff Jones was a domestic terrorist in the late '60s and a fugitive from justice throughout the '70s -- yet now he's a leader of an influential, taxpayer-funded group.

Jones was a fugitive from justice for 11 years. His own account at his Web site says: "As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son."

With Mark Rudd and Bill Ayers, Jones in 1969 co-founded the radical Weatherman, which orchestrated the violent "Days of Rage" riots in Chicago, and later undertook an anti-government bombing campaign. Three of its members died when a bomb they were constructing to attack Fort Dix accidentally detonated in Greenwich Village.

And Jones is still proud of his terrorist activities -- saying as recently as 2004: "To this day, we still, lots of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to try to do."

Now, Jones is back to revolutionary organizing -- but with taxpayers footing the bill. He's the director of the Apollo Alliance's New York affiliate and a consultant to the national group.

Apollo unifies the three most powerful elements of the political left -- environmental groups, labor unions and street organizers like ACORN -- and points them toward a common goal that enriches all of them under the banner of "green jobs." (Van Jones was an Apollo board member until he joined the White House staff.)

So, the answer to Portnoy's question of who really wrote Barack Obama's stimulus bill is...domestic terrorists and corrupt radical Leftist thug groups.

Quick...someone call Janet Napolitano - we have actionable intelligence of domestic terrorism wreaking havoc on America!

At the very least, it should be profoundly disturbing that our President would outsource the crafting of such critical and sweeping legislation to groups that are demonstrably radical and anti-American.  Connecting the dots, however, paints an even more profoundly disturbing picture of our President - that he's one of them.  For all those who, throughout the campaign, mocked me and accused me of absurdity for suggesting that Barack Obama was a Leftist radical or anti-American, I am now accepting formal apologies.

Unfortunately, it doesn't change the fact that those same domestic terrorists and radical anti-American Leftists occupy numerous seats of power throughout the government of the United States, including the Oval Office.  Is it any wonder that America's foundations are crumbling when those holding the reigns of power now are the same ones setting bombs a couple decades ago?  How we came to be here is the subject for future reflection; right now, we need to focus all our efforts on counteracting their radical agenda and pushing them out of power as soon as legally possible.  The success and prosperity of our nation quite literally depends upon it.

There's my two cents.


PS - and since when has Glenn Beck become the preeminent investigative journalist of the decade...?!  Nevertheless, keep it up, Beck!  The American people need someone to do it...

The data show government transfers and rebates have not increased consumption at all. Is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 working? At the time of the act's passage last February, this question was hotly debated. Administration economists cited Keynesian models that predicted that the $787 billion stimulus package would increase GDP by enough to create 3.6 million jobs. Our own research showed that more modern macroeconomic models predicted only one-sixth of that GDP impact. Estimates by economist Robert Barro of Harvard predicted the impact would not be significantly different from zero.

Now, six months after the act's passage, we no longer have to rely solely on the predictions of models. We can look and see what actually happened. Consider first the part of the package that consists of government transfers and rebates. These include one-time payments of $250 to eligible individuals receiving Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, veterans benefits or railroad retirement benefits--and temporary reductions in income-tax withholding for a refundable tax credit of up to $400 for individuals and $800 for families with incomes below certain thresholds. These payments, which began in March of this year, were intended to increase consumption that would help jump-start the economy. Now that a good fraction of these actions have taken place, we can assess their impact.

The nearby chart reviews income and consumption through July, the latest month this data is available for the U.S. economy as a whole.

Consider first the part of the chart pertaining to the spring of this year and observe that disposable personal income (DPI)--the total amount of income people have left to spend after they pay taxes and receive transfers from the government--jumped. The increase is due to the transfer and rebate payments in the 2009 stimulus package. However, as the chart also shows, there was no noticeable impact on personal consumption expenditures. Because the boost to income is temporary, at best only a very small fraction was consumed.

This is exactly what one would expect from "permanent income" or "life-cycle" theories of consumption, which argue that temporary changes in income have little effect on consumption. These theories were developed by Milton Friedman and Franco Modigliani 50 years ago, and have been empirically tested many times. They are much more accurate than simple Keynesian theories of consumption, so the lack of an impact should not be surprising.

Indeed, one need not have looked any further than the Bush administration's Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 to find plenty of evidence that temporary payments of this kind would not jump-start consumption. That package made one-time payments and rebates to people in the spring of 2008, but, as the chart shows, failed to stimulate consumption as had been hoped. Some argued that other factors such as high oil and gasoline prices caused consumption to fall during this period and that consumption would have been even lower without the stimulus, but no significant impact of these rebates is found even after controlling for oil prices.

Consider next the government-spending part of the stimulus package. The Obama administration points to the sharp reduction in the decline in real GDP from the first to the second quarter of 2009 as evidence that the package is working. Economic growth was minus 6.4% in the first quarter and minus 1% in the second quarter, so the implied improvement of 5.4 percentage points is indeed big. But how much of that improved growth rate can be attributed to higher government spending due to the stimulus? If we rely on predictions of models, again we see disagreement and debate. According to our research with modern macroeconomic models, the increase in government spending would add less than a percentage point, a relatively small portion. The model predictions cited by the administration's economists suggest a much larger portion: two to three percentage points. Prof. Barro's model predicts zero.

So let's look at the data on the contributions of government spending and other components of GDP to the 5.4 percentage-point improvement. By far the largest positive contributor to the improvement was investment--which went from minus 9% to minus 3.2%, an improvement of 5.8% and more than enough to explain the improved GDP growth. Investment by private business firms in plant, equipment and inventories, rather than residential investment, were the major contributors to the investment improvement. In contrast, consumption was a negative contributor to the change in GDP growth, because consumption growth declined following the passage of the stimulus package.

One is hard put to see what specific items in the stimulus act could have arrested the decline in business investment by such a magnitude. When one looks at monthly investment indicators--such as new orders for nondefense capital goods--one sees a flattening out starting early in the first quarter of 2009, well before the package went into operation. The free fall of investment orders caused by the financial panic last fall stabilized substantially by January, and investment has remained relatively stable since then. This created the residue of a very large negative growth rate from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009, and then moderation from the first quarter to the second of 2009. There is no plausible role for the fiscal stimulus here.

Direct evidence of an impact by government spending can be found in 1.8 of the 5.4 percentage-point improvement from the first to second quarter of this year. However, more than half of this contribution was due to defense spending that was not part of the stimulus package. Of the entire $787 billion stimulus package, only $4.5 billion went to federal purchases and $17.7 billion to state and local purchases in the second quarter. The growth improvement in the second quarter must have been largely due to factors other than the stimulus package.

Incoming data will reveal more in coming months, but the data available so far tell us that the government transfers and rebates have not stimulated consumption at all, and that the resilience of the private sector following the fall 2008 panic--not the fiscal stimulus program--deserves the lion's share of the credit for the impressive growth improvement from the first to the second quarter. As the economic recovery takes hold, it is important to continue assessing the role played by the stimulus package and other factors. These assessments can be a valuable guide to future policy makers in designing effective policy responses to economic downturns.

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A contract worth nearly $6 million in stimulus funds was awarded by the Obama adminstration to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's pollster in 2008. Federal records show that a contract worth $5.97 million, part of the $787 billion stimulus Congress passed this year, helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.

Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was awarded through a subcontract to Penn's polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland, according to federal records. Federal records also show that a former adviser to President Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign received nearly $70,000 from that contract to help alert viewers in difficult-to-reach communities that their televisions would ssoon no longer receive broadcast signals.

The adviser, Alfredo J. Balsera, who heads a public-affairs firm based in Coral Gables, Fla., helped craft Obama’s Hispanic advertising message. Republicans on Tuesday criticized the federal spending on the advertising project as a waste of taxpayer dollars. They noted that the advertising campaign took place on May 5, only 39 days before the digital television transition was scheduled (June 12).

GOP Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Tom Coburn (Okla.) held a news conference Tuesday to blast 100 “wasteful” projects funded by the $787 billion economic stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year, concluding that at least $7 billion of the $217 billion spent through November was wasteful and mismanaged.

The GOP senators highlighted the direction of the stimulus funds on the same day Obama outlined a new series of proposals for creating jobs that Republicans view as another stimulus measure. The proposals include tax cuts for small businesses, tax incentives for employers to hire new workers and infrastructure spending.

The need for additional measures has raised questions over the efficacy of the stimulus package passed earlier this year. White House officials have said the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the stimulus helped to create 1.6 million jobs. White House aides also have noted that the national employment report for November showed dramatic improvement compared to early this year.

A White House spokeswoman on Tuesday responded to the GOP report by saying Coburn’s previous reports on stimulus spending have been filled with “false or misleading claims.”

“In the end, even if there are a few unwise projects, it is only a handful out of the over 50,000 projects that have been approved to date,” said Liz Oxhorn, a White House spokeswoman. “The real question here is whether Recovery Act critics will at long last acknowledge that well over 99 percent of the projects are sound, effective and working as promised.”

McCain and Coburn did not show any indication that they knew two Democratic political strategists received funding through the grant. A review of federal records by The Hill revealed Penn and Balsera received money from the economic stimulus program. Burson-Marsteller, which Penn heads as CEO worldwide, won the $5.97 million contract through Young & Rubicam. (Burson-Marsteller has been a part of Young & Rubicam Brands since 1979.)

Burson-Marsteller did not respond to two requests on Tuesday to discuss its contract with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). On Wednesday, after news of the contract attracted widespread attention on the Internet, Burston-Marsteller issued a statement defending its work. The firm said it spent only $4.36 million of the contract to complete the digital television advertising initiative. An FCC official confirmed that number.

"Burson-Marsteller, and the approved set of vendors, including its sister company Penn Schoen & Berland LLC, successfully completed the work with the FCC on time and under budget, the company said in its statement. "Burson-Marsteller received a total of $1,375,000 in professional fees to manage and support this time sensitive national and local effort with a large team of professionals. They disbursed the rest to firms around the country in local communities," the company said.

Burson-Marsteller said its sister company, Penn, Schoen & Berland, received only $142,000 in fees. The rest was spent on a $2.4 million media buy that went to newspapers and local radio stations around the country and $147,000 spent for the services of advertising production houses, according to Burson-Marsteller.

A contract award summary posted on Recovery.gov, the government website that tracks stimulus spending, states Burson-Marsteller was awarded a competitive contract by the FCC to help prepare “unready households for the DTV transition.”

The purpose of the campaign was to “bolster the reach, penetration and impact of the FCC’s DTV readiness messages in selected markets, specifically among the groups that had been determined to be the most at risk.” Cassandra Andrade, a senior associate with Balsera Communications, said, “I can see where there’s concern, but the contract was strictly based on our merits. We’ve been working on multicultural outreach for many years.”

Andrade said her firm worked to contact Hispanic television viewers in Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles. Andrade noted that according to Nielsen, a media-research company, there was a sharp decline in the number of unready homes in the week leading up to the digital transition and that 97.5 percent of households were ready for the switch.

A spokesman for Penn, Schoen & Berland did not respond to a request for comment. Penn received scrutiny during and after the 2008 presidential campaign for the role he played in Clinton’s unsuccessful White House bid. Some Clinton supporters questioned whether his service was worth the millions in fees he billed to the campaign.

Penn’s firm billed the campaign $5 million for polling and at least $8 million for sending out direct-mail pieces, according to Time magazine. Clinton’s campaign finally paid off the debt in July. Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said the three jobs saved at Burson-Marsteller represented a poor value for taxpayers. “It illustrates a very poor way to create jobs,” Kyl said.

Kyl said the appropriateness of Democratic strategists receiving funds “depends on whether they exerted some influence.” The digital television advertising campaign ranked as No. 3 on the list of 100 projects that GOP senators on Tuesday highlighted as “pure waste” in the billions of stimulus funds spent this year.

At the top of the GOP list is a $5 million grant from the Department of Energy to create a geothermal energy system for the Oak Ridge City Center shopping mall in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The main problem with the project, say Republicans, is the fact the mall has been losing tenants for years and is mostly empty.

GOP senators also blasted a $1.57 million grant to Penn State University to search for fossils in Argentina and a $100,000 award to a liberal-leaning theater in Minnesota for socially conscious puppet shows. Two million dollars in stimulus money went to build a replica railroad as a tourist attraction in Carson City, Nev. A dinner cruise company based in Chicago received nearly $1 million in funds to combat terrorism.

Half a million dollars went to Arizona State University to study the genetic makeup of ants to determine distinctive roles in ant colonies; $450,000 went to the University of Arizona to study the division of labor in ant colonies. The State University of New York at Buffalo won $390,000 to study young adults who drink malt liquor and smoke marijuana. The National Institutes of Health got $219,000 in funds to study whether female college students are more likely to “hook up” after drinking alcohol.

The University of Hawaii collected $210,000 to study the learning patterns of honeybees, and $700,000 went to help crab fishermen in Oregon recover lost crab pots.

This article was updated on 8:17 p.m.

Update: The Hill initially reported on the basis of federal records that nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to Burson-Marsteller and Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates. Burson-Marsteller received a federal contract worth $5.97 million. As part of that contract, Penn, Schoen & Berland received a subcontract worth more than $2.7 million. A spokesman for Burson-Marsteller said only $4.36 million from the contract is scheduled to be paid out. Burson-Marsteller declined to respond to a request Tuesday to explain the details of its contract.

(CNSNews.com) – The huge economic stimulus package that President Obama signed into law Tuesday will result in “lower wages” for American workers, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). 

The CBO analysis, dated Feb. 11 and sent to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), says the $787-billion plan will increase employment in the short-term, but will run up deficit spending which will “crowd out” private investment in the economy in the long-term. 
 
The analysis concludes that the stimulus will put downward pressure on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and wages after 2014. (The Gross Domestic Product is the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States in one year.)

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.

Oh and one more thing to brighten up my peeps day, TARP 2 is a coming to nationalize all the freaking banks.

Update 5:26pm Eastern. Gag. Harry Reid just said America deserves to hear the words, “Help is on the way.” Like Reagan said: Most terrifying words in the English language…

Bullcrap: Reid waves around US Chamber of Commerce endorsement and claims “You can’t find a company anywhere in America that doesn’t support this legislation.”
Update 5:53pm Eastern. The cloture vote is done. 61-36. The generational thieves can crow.

Senate 'Compromise' Stimulus INCREASES Spending in Over 130 ProgramsSen. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) claims that his proposed compromise "trimmed the fat, fried the bacon and milked the sacred cows" from the widely-ridiculed House "porkulus."

But a closer look at the new 778-page bill (based on information available on Sen. Nelson's site) reveals that the new Nelson-Collins compromise increases spending on over 130 government programs over the original House bill.

Stimulus Watch
The Bill has grown once it reached the Senate. It passed by one vote. We had three rhinos that voted for this monstrosity. View the whole bill at Stimulus Watch.
Just some of the pork in this bill:
Sunset View Park - dog park construction
Las Vegas Performing Arts Center – Construct a new Performing Arts Center within the City's Union Park Development.
Doorbells
New Energy Efficiency Industrial Zones 100 Acres
Initiative to Reduce Prostitution-Off the Streets Program
Software licensing for these 4,110 new computers (Microsoft Office Suite) @ $50.00
SHRA - ACORN
Raul Alvarez Disc Golf Course: This project will develop a 36-hole disc golf course that will be environmentally and financially sustainable.
Purchase of Tasers
Provide funding to convert 60 hybrid electric vehicles to Plug-in Hyrbrid Vehicles
Double Eagle Concentrated Solar Plant - 100 MW
Abengoa Solar designed 100MW solar parabolic trough electric generation plant
Installation of energy efficient windows at various sites
Madison Heights Energy Project
Weed and Seed program for at risk youth.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a liberal wish list if it didn’t include something for ACORN, and sure enough, there is $5.2 billion for community-development block grants and “neighborhood stabilization activities,” which ACORN is eligible to apply for. Finally, the bill allocates $650 million for activities related to the switch from analog to digital TV, including $90 million to educate “vulnerable populations” that they need to go out and get their converter boxes or lose their TV signals. Obviously, this is stimulative stuff: Any economist will tell you that you can’t get higher productivity and economic growth without access to reruns of Family Feud.
Summary:

$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
$380 million in the Senate bill for the Women, Infants and Children program
$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”

From both Capitol Hill staff reports and reader e-mails, the phones have been melting down in Washington — and not from Americans who are enthralled with the idea of stealing $1 trillion from future generations for a Crap Sandwich Supreme. If you can’t get through the first time, try, try again. CALL CALL CALL

The government wouldn't be able to spend at least one-fourth of a proposed $825 billion economic stimulus plan until after 2010, according to a preliminary report by the Congressional Business Office that suggests it may take longer than expected to boost the economy. The government would spend about $26 billion of the money this year and $110 billion more next year, the report said. About $103 billion would be spent in 2011, while $53 billion would be spent in 2012 and $63 billion between 2013 and 2019.

• Less than $5 billion of the $30 billion set aside for highway spending would be spent within the next two years, the CBO said.

• Only $26 billion out of $274 billion in infrastructure spending would be delivered into the economy by the Sept. 30 end of the budget year, just 7 percent.

• Just one in seven dollars of a huge $18.5 billion investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy programs would be spent within a year and a half.

• About $907 million of a $6 billion plan to expand broadband access in rural and other underserved areas would be spent by 2011, CBO said.

• Just one-fourth of clean drinking water projects can be completed by October of next year.

• $275 billion worth of tax cuts to 95 percent of filers and a huge infusion of help for state governments is to be distributed into the economy more quickly.

[Note: The CBO's analysis applied only to 40 percent of the overall stimulus bill, and doesn't cover tax cuts or efforts; a CBO report outlining all of its costs is expected in the next week or so.]

• The Obama administration said $3 of every $4 in the package should be spent within 18 months to have maximum impact on jobs and taxpayers; if House or Senate versions of the bill do not spend the money as quickly, the White House will work with lawmakers to achieve the goal of spending 75% of the overall package over the next year and a half.

[Source: AP: Three-quarters of stimulus to go in 18 months; January 22, 2009; Bloomberg News: Much of Stimulus Wont Be Spent Before 2011, CBO Says; January 20, 2009; link]

Who will be spending the money? Will the states be receiving any money to spend, community organizations? Churches?

The economic stimulus plan now moving through Congress would shower billions of federal dollars on state and local governments desperate for cash:

• The House stimulus bill includes an extra $87 billion in federal aid to state Medicaid programs.

• It allots some $120 billion to boost state and city education programs.

• There's $4 billion for state and local anticrime initiatives in the legislation, not to mention $30-plus billion for highways and other infrastructure projects.

• $6.9 billion to help state and local governments make investments that make them more energy efficient and reduce carbon emissions.

• $87 billion to states, increasing through the end of FY 2010 the share of Medicaid costs the Federal government reimburses all states by 4.8 percent, with extra relief tied to rates of unemployment.

• $120 billion to states and school districts to stabilize budgets and prevent tax increases and deep cuts to critical education programs.

Overall, about one-quarter of the entire $825 billion recovery package would be devoted to activities crucial to governors, mayors, and local school boards - making them among the plans biggest beneficiaries.

[Sources: Committee on Appropriations: January 15, 2009; Reuters: Roads, energy, states win in US stimulus plan;15 January 2009; Christian Science Monitor: States to win big in stimulus sweepstakes; House bill allots almost one-quarter of the $825 billion recovery package to states, localities. How will that boost the economy?; January 25, 2009; Link]

CBO on the stimulus Plan 

If the agency responsible for reporting economic data to Congress as well as commenting on budget proposals concluded the Senate's stimulus plan not only won't have much positive impact, but will actually hinder output in years to come, shouldn't the American people be informed about this?

On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office issued a rather pessimistic view of the stimulus bill in front of the Senate, and virtually no major media outlets reported it.

Not the New York Times. Not the Washington Post. Not USA Today. Not ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, or MSNBC.

WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle. All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools. The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people. At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place. And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."  Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

(CNSNews.com) – The huge economic stimulus package that President Obama signed into law Tuesday will result in “lower wages” for American workers, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). 

The CBO analysis, dated Feb. 11 and sent to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), says the $787-billion plan will increase employment in the short-term, but will run up deficit spending which will “crowd out” private investment in the economy in the long-term. 
 
The analysis concludes that the stimulus will put downward pressure on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and wages after 2014. (The Gross Domestic Product is the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States in one year.)