Thursday, January 22, 2009

Its the ecoomy, stoopid?

Barack Obama has named his priorities for rebuilding America as infrastructure and alternative energy. The stimulus supposedly will rebuild the economy by focusing the government spigot towards these two areas. If so, that spigot seems a little narrow. The CBO notes that only $4 billion of the $30 billion for highways gets spent in the first two years. On energy, less than $3 billion of the $18.5 billion will be used before 2011. Only half of the $14 billion budget for school construction and renovations will get spent before then, too.

In other words, the stimulus package appears to be nothing more than a big pork product designed to benefit Congress and Obama much more than the economy. While economists believe that the recession will be long and harsh, few have predicted that it will last for more than two years. And if we need to pass a stimulus bill with such urgency, why does it allocate most of the spending in years 3 and 4 of the Obama administration? The idea of government stimulus packages is to create jobs now, not three and four years from now.

We’d be better off leaving the money in the private sector in the form of massive tax cuts, matched with cuts in government spending. Private capital creates jobs much faster than anything proposed in this package.

Interestingly, the Post ran this on the front page of their business section, page D-1, rather than on the front page of the newspaper. The media keeps telling us that the economic crisis is the most important story at the moment. If so, pushing this highly critical look at the Obama administration’s economic centerpiece to section D makes little sense …

- From an article in "HotAir"

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