Yesterday we heard from Canada’s budget watchdog (and CBC misreported it). All the Canadian media reported it because the tail differed with the dog over budget and economic issues. Today, the media is all but missing-in-action on the news of the U.S.‘s Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of the Obama “stimulus”, um, fraud, which increasingly seems to be based on freaking out Americans as much as humanly possible through fear and shear panic, and trash-talking the economy as much as possible.
CBO: Obama stimulus harmful over long haul
Stephen Dinan
Wednesday, February 4, 2009President Obama’s economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.
CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing. …
Meanwhile, the brilliant Charles Krauthammer says in his latest MUST READ Washington Post column:
The Fierce Urgency of Pork
Friday, February 6, 2009; Page A17“A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.”
—President Obama, Feb. 4.Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared “we have chosen hope over fear.” Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
[…]
It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus—and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
[…]
The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington.
Meanwhile, as I pointed out on Monday, the state-owned CBC’s taxpayer-paid opinionator, Heather Mallick, far-leftist, Obama sycophant and apologist, wrote in her latest opinion piece for Canadians (which was based on an unsound bashing of the Conservative government’s “stimulus” package in Canada): “In contrast, the Obama economic stimulus is carefully targeted, at health care, schools and public works. His economists put thought into it; they were as calm as the president himself.” Once again that’s “Carefully targeted”?! And “calm”! Huh.
So I also excerpted a piece by the privately-funded columnist Peggy Noonan, writing for the privately-owned Wall Street Journal:
…The final bill was privately agreed by most and publicly conceded by many to be a big, messy, largely off-point and philosophically chaotic piece of legislation. The Congressional Budget Office says only 25% of the money will even go out in the first year. This newspaper, in its analysis, argues that only 12 cents of every dollar is for something that could plausibly be called stimulus.
What was needed? Not pork, not payoffs, not eccentric base-pleasing, group-greasing forays into birth control as stimulus, as the speaker of the House dizzily put it before being told to remove it.
[…]
That’s what the stimulus bill was about—not knowing what time it is, not knowing the old pork-barrel, group-greasing ways are over, done, embarrassing. When you create a bill like that, it doesn’t mean you’re a pro, it doesn’t mean you’re a tough, no-nonsense pol. It means you’re a slob.
That’s how the Democratic establishment in the House looks, not like people who are responding to a crisis, or even like people who are ignoring a crisis, but people who are using a crisis. Our hopeful, compelling new president shouldn’t have gone with this bill. He made news this week by going to the House to meet with Republicans. He could have made history by listening to them….
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
Contact Mr. Johannesen about this article using this form. Please refer to article's title.
FOLLOW @JoelJohannesen ON X!
- State-Funding of Sports Boondoggles Need To Be Sent To The Penalty Box - Wednesday March 13, 2024 at 4:44 pm
- I’m from the government and I’m here to help you become barely mediocre like us. - Tuesday March 5, 2024 at 11:53 am
- Big-Ass Government makes Big-Ass Blunder - Friday March 1, 2024 at 12:36 pm
