Tuesday in Denver, Barry Obama outdid Herbert Hoover and FDR combined, by signing a 1000 page spending bill made up entirely from Nancy Pelosi's backlog of pet pork projects. He delivered it with a speech.
Let's get right to it, shall we?
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that I will sign today – a plan that meets the principles I laid out in January – is the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history.
Use of the term "sweeping" may be quite apt. Pelosi swept up all the refuse from the last two years into one pile, and stapled it together for the president to sign.
It is the product of broad consultations – and the recipient of broad support – from business leaders, unions, and public interest groups, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, Democrats and Republicans, mayors as well as governors.
Wait, the US Chamber of Commerce said it "does not want president-elect Barack Obama creating another New Deal as part of his economic stimulus plans. " So, where does Obama get the right to claim an endorsement from the CofC? Should we start counting the misrepresentations now?
It is a rare thing in Washington for people with such different viewpoints to come together and support the same bill, and on behalf of our nation, I thank them for it, including your two outstanding new Senators, Michael Bennet and Mark Udall.
Two Thoughts: One, there are no differing viewpoints among the purveyors of this piece of work. They are all of a single mind on it. They are zombies for this stuff. Two, what makes Bennet and Udall outstanding, other than the fact that they will soon have more experience as senators than Obama had?
I also want to thank my Vice President Joe Biden for working behind the scenes from the very start to make this recovery act possible. I want to thank Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid for acting so quickly and proving that Congress could step up to this challenge. I want to thank Max Baucus, Chairman of the Finance Committee, without whom none of this would have happened. And I want to thank all the Committee Chairs and members of Congress for coming up with a plan that is both bold and balanced enough to meet the demands of this moment.
At least we have all the suspects in the lineup now. And "stepping up" isn't quite the appropriate word: It was more like a hog stampede.
The American people were looking to them for leadership, and that is what they provided.
I suppose every hog stampede has to have its lead hogs.
What makes this recovery plan so important is not just that it will create or save three and a half million jobs over the next two years, including nearly 60,000 in Colorado. It’s that we are putting Americans to work doing the work that America needs done in critical areas that have been neglected for too long – work that will bring real and lasting change for generations to come.
Create or save? That's pretty wiggly. How is it that jobs are "saved" by this? Can it be that my company won't lay me off because we are building a highway in Utah? Or is it more jobs in Utah? That can't be it, because any government conscription of the construction talent removes that person from the private workforce.
3-1/2 million jobs. Even if you hire all of them to build bridges to nowheres, how does this help the economy? What wealth has been created? More importantly, what does this have to do with the essential functions of the federal government (yes, I digress, but the topic keeps coming up).
Because we know we can’t build our economic future on the transportation and information networks of the past, we are remaking the American landscape with the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950s.
We can't build an economic future at all if we spend our dwindling resources on make work projects. If instead you create an environment where people can voluntarily improve the infrastructure, then you have something. For the government to remake the landscape is a frightening vision. Eisenhower built the highways for defense purposes. If we instead invest in our defense capabilities, good civilian use will come from that too.
To be continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment