If the stimulus bill is any measure, though, it is foolish to hope this administration and its allies can act quickly and prudently at the same time. Throw the staggering dollar amounts into the mix, along with the inherent risk of fraud and waste, and the recipe is one for disaster. by Matthew Bastian
(conservative)
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum, it is impossible to accuse President Obama of lacking ambition in his legislative agenda. Coming on the heels of unprecedented stimulus and spending bills earlier this year, he wants to tackle a health care overhaul, address carbon emissions and reform immigration policy by December. Congress, of course, led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, is only too happy to oblige.
It is a bold undertaking, to say the least. But it also makes you wonder if Obama realizes he won a full four-year term last November. Why the rush to take so much off the to-do list before Christmas?
Obama supporters point out that the president is simply showing the courage to tackle the major problems facing the country and fix the mess left by the previous administration - "cleaning up the elephant poop" as the quip goes. That may be true, but there is also an accelerating, inverse relationship between the scope of his initiatives and the level of deliberation and clarity of detail that lie behind them.
With the health care proposal, for example, the costs are elusive. Will it be $1.6 trillion over ten years or only one trillion? With the way money is being spent in Washington, can voters even fathom the difference anymore? No matter, Obama and the Democrats assure us: allocating money "more efficiently" within the system and taxing some health benefits will cover the tab.
The price tag aside, trying to keep up with the implications of such a monstrosity quickly becomes a tedious exercise for all but the most determined observers and policy wonks. Will I be able to keep my private insurance or will the government plan crowd out the market? What will the impact be on small businesses? It is a maddening to sort through the maze of contradictory statements coming from both sides.
In pushing his plan, Obama chides Republicans for using "scare tactics" when they warn of socialized medicine and a single-payer system. And yet, at a recent meeting of the American Medical Association, the president said, "If we do not fix our healthcare system, Americans may go the way of General Motors -- paying more, getting less and going broke." (Translation: only the other side uses scare tactics. Implying that the entire country could go the way of a failed automaker if I don't get my way? Well, that's just the cool, pragmatic guy in the room telling it like it is.)
We've been through this brand of sky-is-falling rhetoric before, of course, back in February before Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, the murky details of which were cloaked in a thousand-plus pages of legislative tedium that nobody bothered to read. At the time, we were told that the situation was so dire that we had to do something; meaningful debate took a back seat to a mindless call to action. And it was all necessary, so the narrative went, to prevent double digit unemployment and to get companies like Caterpillar hiring again.
Since the signing of the stimulus bill, Caterpillar cut over 2000 more jobs and unemployment is flirting with 10%. In a rare moment of humility, Vice President Joe Biden recently acknowledged that "everyone guessed wrong" on the impact of the stimulus bill, using wildly optimistic projections to support their conclusions. President Obama had promised that 90% of the jobs "created or saved" would be in the private sector. Instead, the stimulus thus far has benefitted mostly the public payrolls, sparing some policemen and teachers the axe.
One clear result of all the spending, though, is a cloud of higher interest rates looming on the horizon and a doubling of the national debt that will burden generations to come. Even financial wizards Warren Buffett and George Soros, both Obama supporters, have expressed concern about the dangers of printing all this money.
Undeterred, the president proposes that we completely revamp our health care and energy policies by year's end, changing the foundation of the country in the process. That's six months. I know people who take that long to pick out new curtains for the living room. And yet we are implicitly told that we don't have time to properly weigh the costs and benefits; it's so urgent that we have to act now, details and hidden consequences be damned. If the stimulus bill is any measure, though, it is foolish to hope this administration and its allies can act quickly and prudently at the same time. Throw the staggering dollar amounts into the mix, along with the inherent risk of fraud and waste, and the recipe is one for disaster.
For those of us who were never swayed by the Obama magic, the reckless, breakneck pace of the agenda smacks of a orgiastic power grab, with Democrats and left-wing special interests plowing through as much of their wish list as possible before the window of opportunity closes. Polls show that Americans are becoming wary of all the spending, which brightens Republican hopes in the 2010 mid-term elections. Sensing that the time is now or never, the Left has unleashed a legislative blitzkrieg, covering so much policy ground so quickly that voters won't know what hit them until it's too late.
In defending the hubristic reach of Obama's first six months, Spokesman Robert Gibbs is fond of saying "we won" and "America voted for change in November." And perhaps therein lies the brilliance of last year's campaign: "change" can mean whatever the president happens to be peddling now that he's in office.
But at least some of his supporters must be questioning whether this was the sort of change they believed in.
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In regard to the stimulus investment, my understanding is as follows:
1. The current surging fuel cost (World oil prices doubled during the last 6 months) is overwhelming the market rally. And the pending clean energy bill might serve as a second stimulus package world-wide boosting private investments.
2. People are so worried about losing their job, coverage, denial of treatment, which seems to increase bank deposit latetly. That means stimulus funding mainly goes toward bank deposit for a rainy day increasing jobless rate. It proves again that a healthy society yields better productivity, prosperity. It is time to 'Change' the notion of the public health as a fundamental human right and install 'a safety system for all' like all of the other industrialized nations, I think.
3. The stimulus funding begins to mobilize just 11%, meanwhile, the auto industry has undergone its restructuring with the massive job-related impact.
4. The pandemic swine flu has been hurting the global economy seriously.
Obama’s “stimulus” is a train-wreck- these jobs figures are far worse than the ones the White House warned us about if we DIDN’T pass the bill- so it was passed, and then unemployment soars anyway? He said it would top-out at 8%, we give him a trillion dollars, and he and Joey Pluggs now tell us they "underestimated" as it pushes 10%? -oh please Instead of creating jobs, interest rates were bumped up, the dollar slid… and it didn’t help anybody get any work. Much of this is due to the fact that Obama’s agenda has mortified almost every machine of job-and-growth creation in the country. The One couldn’t deliver the type of “temporary, targeted, and timely” bill that he promised repeatedly, and regardless of his image in the press, Obama simply lacks the the political stature to control Pelosi and Reid… who hit the trough hard, while bickering like siblings. And the lack of GOP co-conspirators exposed Obama politically… this legislation now looks to be a HUGE gamble. And when all this pork-n-welfare fails to generate any real economic gains, the Democrats will face a bloodbath in 2010. http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com
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