By Ben Stein on 1.29.09 @ 9:31AM
I love this. The new kind of politics of hope.
I love this. The new kind of politics of hope. Eight hours of
debate in the HR to pass a bill spending $820 billion, or roughly
$102 billion per hour of debate.
Only ten per cent of the "stimulus" to be spent on 2009.
Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ or both
members of the Service Employees International Union, federal,
state, and municipal employee unions, or other
Democrat-controlled unions.
This bill is sent to Congress after Obama has been in office for
seven days. It is 680 pages long. According to my calculations,
not one member of Congress read the entire bill before this vote.
Obviously, it would have been impossible, given his schedule, for
President Obama to have read the entire bill.
For the amount spent we could have given every unemployed person
in the United States roughly $75,000.
We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing
through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly
$300,000.
There has been pork barrel politics since there has been
politics. The scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been
imagined before -- and no one can be sure it will actually do
much stimulation.
Further, no one can be sure that we are not already at the
trough/inflection point of the recession such that this money
will be spent mostly after the recovery is well under way.
How long until the debt incurred under this program is so immense
that it causes a downgrade in the sovereign debt of the USA? What
happens to us then?
This has been a punch in the solar plexus to the kind of
responsible, far-seeing, mature government processes that are
needed to protect America. This is more than the pork barrel.
This is a coup for the constituencies of the party in power and
against the idea of a responsible government itself. A bleak day.
Unfortunately, it is only the latest in a long series of such
days stretching across decades of rule by both parties, to the
point where truly responsible government is only a distant echo
of our forgotten ancestors.
