It was, nonetheless, an alarming thought to wake up to: even if you accept the concept that the ’stimulus’ bill that Congress saddled on us is creating jobs -
…we’re shifting any jobs generated away from useful ones, like manufacturing, and towards useless ones, like government.
Have a nice morning!
Moe Lane
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
I have not yet blogged about Recovery.org, the indispensable site set up by Onvia to keep track of how the Obama administration is spending your ’stimulus’ money. Recovery.org offers a number of ways to search - by state, county and program. They provide updates on how much stimulus funding is spent over time, and how may jobs the administration contends have been created (or saved). The site is doing quite well considering that it must rely on federal agencies for much of its information.
While Recover.org is a private site, the Obama administration has also set up its own site - Recovery.gov. It does not seem to be as up-to-date as the private site, but you can’t really expect a government agency to to move as efficiently or nimbly as the private sector. But while they may lag behind, they’re doing their best to ensure that Recovery.gov is running smoothly by… October:
During a recent field hearing in Brooklyn, N.Y., House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., said Recovery.gov is “not a useful database where citizens can go to see where their money is being spent.” Do you agree with that assessment? How long will it be before the site meets its goals?
Democrats in Congress are set to draft another ’stimulus’ package — one that will waste hundreds of billions of dollars on projects that were too sketchy to make it into their first trillion dollar spending bill. They would have you believe that just like the pork-filled first bill was justified, so is this boondoggle. But it looks more like Democrats are simply too panicked about the slow pace of ‘recovery,’ so they’re looking to throw more of your money at the problem:
Democratic House members say they have less time to wait for signs of economic recovery than President Barack Obama , a conflict of timing that lawmakers say has become increasingly evident in their dealings with the White House…
Nancy Pelosi has got some stones:
House Dems eyeing another stimulus bill
At a special meeting of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on Tuesday morning, Democrats heard again from their trusted band of economists and came away reinforced that Congress would need to spend billions of additional taxpayer dollars in the coming months to help pull the economy out its severe recession.
One proposal being considered is an additional economic stimulus bill. Just last month, President Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus measure that Democrats contended was needed to save or create 3.5 million jobs and that Republicans derided as nothing more than debt-spending on wasteful federal projects…
I’m here at CPAC, where I’ve had the opportunity to meet briefly with Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell to talk over current issues. After a strong speech (which you might ultimately be able to find here), McConnell addressed questions from several bloggers.
To me, the most notable answer from McConnell came in response to a question from Fausta - when she asked his thoughts on Michael Steele’s suggestion that the RNC might not support the re-election of Senators Snowe, Collins and Specter, given their votes for the Obama-Reid-Pelosi Debt Spending Plan. McConnell first threw cold water on the idea - saying that he would support the re-election of his Senate GOP colleagues. Then he predicted that Arlen Specter would be a more dependable vote in the future, saying:
Well what do you know? Despite the rhetoric from President Obama and Congressional Democrats, it looks like the rich are set to reap more than their fair share from the Obama-Reid-Pelosi debt spending plan:
Billionaire Paul Allen is a Microsoft cofounder, the owner of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the owner of the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers.
And, thanks to the stimulus bill President Obama signed this week, he’s also about to be as much as a billion dollars richer.
Gee, there seem to be lots of Blue Dogs going home and telling their constituents:
It begs the question: if the Blue Dogs are so influential, then why are they now apologizing and declaiming responsibility for how it turned out? Either they are not all that influential, or they used that influence in support of Nancy Pelosi’s agenda.
The Blue Dogs make a pretty good case: they bellied up to the bar and by-and-large supported a spending bill that Joe Biden warns will be used against them next year. Now the House leadership seems likely to ask them to line up and vote to end the secret ballot for union organizing — which is likely to wind up even less popular than the ’stimulus’ vote. According to the Arkansas News, the Blue Dogs have told House leadership they don’t want the measure to come up for a vote:
An official informed the group that Berry recently had told him that he thought the bill was a piece of junk and that he only voted for it because he knew then-President Bush would veto it.
Forty-nine percent (49%) of U.S. voters trust their own judgment more than President Obama’s when it comes to the economic issues affecting the nation.
The Nets made the mistake of leaking this idea before the money was approved. They were supposed to save such discussions until after Congress passed it. That said, once states start divvying up the cash that Barack Obama wants to give them, you can bet the Nets — and a host of other franchises — will start lining up for a share of the pot:
The future of Atlantic Yards –Brooklyn’s biggest development project — could hinge on President Obama’s $827 billion stimulus plan.
City and state officials say they expect developer Bruce Ratner to lobby hard for a piece of the federal pork to help bail out his reeling $4 billion plan to bring an NBA arena and 16 residential and office towers to Prospect Heights, which is in jeopardy because of the economic downtown.
Borough President Marty Markowitz, the project’s biggest cheerleader, said yesterday that funds from the stimulus bill should go to offset arena construction, and especially aid Ratner in a revamp of Long Island Rail Road’s Vanderbilt rail yard.
“This project is shovel-ready, and the jobs it would create are needed now,” said Markowitz, adding Atlantic Yards would also boost businesses nearby.
With hundreds of billions to spend, the federal government might just buy Los Angeles an NFL team — or help the Nets lure LeBron James to their taxpayer-financed Brooklyn home.
Courtesy of Senator McConnell’s office:
• Tax Benefits For Golf Carts, Electric Motorcycles and ATVs: (Pg. 60 of the Tax Division of Conference Report, lines 9-16, “(2) SPECIFIED VEHICLE.—The term ‘specified vehicle’ means any vehicle which—‘‘(A) is a low speed vehicle within the meaning of section 571.3 of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations (as in effect on the date of the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Tax Act of 2009), or ‘‘(B) has 2 or 3 wheels.”)
Blue Dog Democrat Boren, the lone Democrat [in the Oklahoma delegation - bf], was the first to pop off about President Obama.
Boren said Obama “missed an opportunity” for the stimulus bill to be bipartisan.
“It was a good thing for the president to meet with Republicans. The previous administration never met with Democratic members of Congress.
“The problem is that it became a Democrat bill and not an American bill,” Boren continued, “because he didn’t use any of the Republican ideas.”
Apart from us conservatives, Boren seems to be one of the few who recognizes that Obama has been talking through his hat. The President has droned on about bipartisanship, but this bill is a partisan vehicle. Recall that at his first meeting with Congressional Republicans, Obama was encouraging about using some of their ideas, only to reject them all later — because ‘he won.’ Obama has denigrated Republican ideas, while press secretary Robert Gibbs has been forced to admit that he can’t think of a single proposal suggested by a Republican that Obama included in the bill.
Boren now joins Walt Minnick among the Democrat truth tellers.
CNN’s Political Ticker reports that with Ted Kennedy apparently unavailable for a Senate vote tomorrow, Harry Reid is trying to line up one more Republican to vote for the Democrat spending bill. The concern is that without Kennedy, the bill has only the minimum number of votes required to pass: 60. And the three GOP supporters had made clear that their support was conditional on there being 61 votes — so none could be described as the decisive vote that passed the package.
According to Roll Call (subscription required), Reid has a backup plan in case he can’t get another Republican:
I don’t mean to be monotonous. If you haven’t figured out by now that Congressional Democrats really have no clue what they’re doing, or whether it will work, you never will. Charlie Rangel seems to think that this is a selling point, rather than a red flag.
I guess you might say there are two types of people in the world: those who think it’s a bad idea to spend $1 trillion without knowing what you’re buying or whether it will work, and Congressional Democrats.
And lest you think that Rangel simply hasn’t read the bill because he’s so busy reviewing his briefs for the Ethics Committee, Congressman Chris Carney admits he’s in the same boat.
What are the chances they’ll abstain when the time to vote arrives?
How much can you hide in a 1,434 page conference report? Quite a lot. According to Bloomberg, Congressional leaders managed to squeeze in a tax break of ‘up to $10 billion’ that General Motors has been looking for:
GM won a provision that will erase a tax liability of up to $10 billion that would have resulted from restructuring efforts, said Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat.
The bill also includes $8 billion for Harry Reid’s re-election effort a MagLev train from Southern California to Las Vegas:
Congressional Democrats have now agreed to a ‘bipartisan stimulus compromise’ supported by fewer than 1 percent of Congressional Republicans, on a plan to spend about $780 billion or so of your money trying to get the economy moving again. Economists say this bill might provide a few temporary jobs for some workers, but it does nothing to correct the fundamental problems of the economy. Each version of the bill so far has wasted too much on pork-barrel projects and contained little in pro-growth tax cuts. We’ve seen that the bill has contained the seeds of nationalized health care, an end to welfare reform, and the potential to send the economy into a death spiral through a new trade war.
And we don’t know what’s in the bill now, because Democrats closed the doors and negotiated it in the middle of the night. In defiance of their public promises, they will push it to a vote before Members of Congress have had a chance to review it - let alone the public. And rather than this being the last big-ticket spending item this Congress will consider, it’s probably the first of many. The Obama administration says more funds may yet be needed for more bank bailouts. Hundreds of billions will be needed for health care ‘reform.’ There’s still over $400 billion in spending left to approve for the 2009 federal budget. And Congress will take up a transportation bill this Summer.
The Wall Street Journal says that Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter may have been snookered. Now that the Senate has passed a slimmed-down porked up version of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi debt spending plan, the White House is pushing to add back many of the items that it cut out to get their support:
Several days ago I wrote about the toothless and useless ‘Blue Dog Democrats,’ who strut around bragging about their commitment to balanced budgets, but who regularly take a dive when told to. Apparently their liberal masters have told them it’s time to shut up and get in line.
This provision was not in the House version of the bill, and was not in the Senate version of the bill. And now Carl Levin wants to sneak it into the conference report — despite the fact that Republican supporters are insisting that the bill be slimmed down?
General Motors Corp. may win protection from a tax liability of as much as $7 billion when Senate stimulus legislation moves to a conference committee, Senator Carl Levin said.
“There’s some strong feeling that it ought to be included in the conference report,” Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said of the protection in comments to reporters today. “There’s strong support for it.”
The $838 billion stimulus measure the Senate approved today doesn’t include the tax provision for GM, nor does the House version. A “technical change” that won’t increase the cost of the legislation could be added in the House-Senate conference committee before the proposal is voted on again in both chambers, Levin said.
Do lawmakers see any tension between a new culture of ‘accountability,’ and a $7 billion payoff that hasn’t even gotten a Congressional hearing yet?
On the other hand, Geithner doesn’t pay taxes, Daschle doesn’t pay taxes, Al Franken doesn’t pay taxes, Rahm Emanuel doesn’t pay taxes… why should GM suddenly have to?
Bloomberg reports on the news that Treasury Secretary and Tax Cheat Tim Geithner has delayed until tomorrow the announcement of the ‘TARP II’ request. White House Economics Director Summers says that they’ve pushed it off because they don’t want any distractions from the cloture vote today on the Obama-Reid-Pelosi debt spending bill. Summers is right about one thing: if the administration announced today it was getting ready to plow another trillion dollars into the banking system, Senators might not be so eager to spend a trillion more on pork-barrel projects:
President Barack Obama’s struggle to push an economic stimulus bill through Congress may seem easy compared to what he’ll encounter when he returns to Capitol Hill for additional funds to rescue the banking system.
Obama will likely need to ask Congress for more money to recapitalize banks, as much as $1 trillion on top of the roughly $300 billion remaining in the current Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to an estimate by former Federal Reserve economist Ward McCarthy. That will be an even tougher sell for the new president than the stimulus plan, which is headed for a Senate vote this week after passing the House with no Republican support…
Geithner’s speech has been pushed back one day to Feb. 10 to avoid distracting attention from the economic-stimulus bill, White House economics director Lawrence Summers said today. That is the same day the Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill.
“There’s a desire to keep the focus right now on the economic recovery program, which is so very, very important,” Summers said today on ABC’s “This Week.”
While Bloomberg cites a figure of $1 trillion, there doesn’t seem to be any real consensus on what Geithner will propose tomorrow. Senator Schumer has previously said that he anticipates the ultimate cost of TARP II may be as much as $3-$4 trillion. Apparently the Obama administration is going to great lengths to make sure Senators have no idea of the TARP request when they vote on the stimulus bill. That doesn’t show much confidence about the public reaction.
Obama promised us openness, and this move is awfully transparent.
