What Happened To The Stimulus Money?
by Big Dog on Jun 13, 2010 at 14:34 Political
And why are teacher’s, firefighter’s and police officer’s salaries a federal concern?
The stimulus bill signed into law last February was a 787 billion dollar boondoggle. The total package, with interest on borrowed money, will put the thing over 1 TRILLION dollars. The unfortunate thing is that we got very little for our money and the things it was spent on are NOT things that will stimulate the economy and a lot of them are things states are responsible for.
Obama is pleading with Democrats to pass another 50 BILLION dollars of “emergency” funds to prevent teachers, firefighters and police officers from being laid off.
President Obama urged reluctant lawmakers Saturday to quickly approve nearly $50 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments, saying the money is needed to avoid “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters” and to support the still-fragile economic recovery. Washington Post
The first thing we should realize is that the federal government is not responsible for teachers, firefighters or police officers unless they work for the federal government. The states AND ONLY THE STATES are responsible for the people in these professions who work in the individual states. It is not the responsibility of taxpayers from Maryland to pay for the teachers, firefighters or police officers in Michigan or any other state. Each state is responsible and using federal tax dollars to pay for these things taxes Americans twice for the same thing.
People are taxed by their states to pay for these services and then their federal tax dollars are used to pay for the same services, often because of mismanagement at the state level.
It is up to the states to decide if they can afford to pay for the same level of services or if they will have to be scaled back. The states need to decide whether or not to raise taxes to pay for these things. It is not the responsibility of the federal government and our tax dollars should not be paying it.
This is Obama pushing our tax dollars to the people in the unions. Obama has the support of the teachers and many of the law enforcement and firefighting unions (whether the individual members support him or not) and he wants to ensure he has their votes so he will pay for them with OUR money.
Obama already signed one stimulus into law and that stimulus provided for teachers and for law enforcement.
- $4 billion for state and local law enforcement agencies
- $44.5 billion in aid to local school districts to prevent layoffs and cutbacks, with flexibility to use the funds for school modernization and repair (State Equalization Fund)
Read the Wiki article and see how much money the stimulus funneled to things that will not, in any way shape or form, stimulate the economy. The total education package was over 90 BILLION dollars.
Obama spent 48.5 BILLION dollars for teachers and law enforcement and now he wants 50 BILLION dollars more. If the stimulus worked as sold then these entities would not need additional money, if we were to accept that the federal government should be paying for them at all.
The stimulus is not stimulating and it is a failure. Obama wants more money to throw at his supporters in the unions at the expense of the taxpayers and our national sovereignty. How much more debt will we accrue before we are totally owned by another country?
It is not the job of the federal government to pay for the salaries of people working for the individual states. The states are solely responsible for these salaries and if they cannot afford them then they need to make the same tough decisions that plenty of private companies have made and lay off employees.
Obama is trying to use OUR money to pay off the unions and to pander for their votes. We should not be paying for these things and it is criminal that we paid for them with the first stimulus.
Let us not keep making the same mistakes by continuing to throw good money after bad on an economic folly.
Never surrender, never submit.
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Tags: failure, firefighter, mini stimulus, Obama, payoffs, police, stimulus, teacher, unions, vote buying
I looked at recovery.gov and found that most states nave received less than one-quarter of the stimulus money. Even if it was the job of the feds to pay the firefighters, teachers, and police officers it seems as if the government should at least spend the rest of the stimulus money before taking even more money away from us.
Of topic but BD!
What was actually on the ships the Israelis interrupted breaking the laws of high-sea trade?
We hear tons of Bad Israel, Good murdering Hamas, but I want to know were there arms or supplies for terrorists on those ships or not?
Do you know?
Bullet proof vests, night vision goggles and gas masks were reportedly found among lots of humanitarian items. I might add that israel will be happy to let the true humanitarian aid items in to Gaza after the ships dock in Israel and are checked by that country to ensure no bad stuff is getting through.
Bullet proof vests and Night vision goggles are standard issue for me in japan, doing my bike rides.
I need a gas mask just to sleep with myself after a meal of sushi…
Flash to Star Wars one, “…you don’t need to see our papers,”
We don’t need to see their papers…
“…we can pass.”
Move along, move along!
The problem again is the same as we’ve been debating all week. The stimulus was a fixed amount of money and was in no way sized correctly to deal with the actual depth of the recession. I understand though that it is essential for you to ignore that fact in order to keep calling the stimulus a failure.
It would be like sending 2 firetrucks to a fire only to get there and find out in the time it took it had already spread to the whole block. Would you call those 2 trucks a failure for letting it spread when it clearly was growing before they even started working? Would you call them a failure not controlling the larger fire even though once they found out the fire was much larger they still only had 2 trucks to deal with it?
And I might add: If they requested more trucks later would you ask why they needed more when 2 were already sent?
BHO has been holding the stim in reserve, so he can buy him some votes come Nov. That’s the real reason he has not spent that money.
And another thing- could the reason he has been so slow on the oil spill be because the Gulf States are run by Republican Governors?
Yes, and environmentalist radicals put bubbles in the pipes to cause the initial rig explosion to stop all oil drilling, right?
I can see that you completely ignored his point. They forced the drilling to be so far out and so deep that when the accident happened the solution was hampered. If this had been in shallower water it would have been caped. Surely you understood that and were just trying to be sarcastic. Otherwise you need one of those hard helmets to go out in public.
“I can see that you completely ignored his point.”
Did I now? Feel free to locate and then quote me the part where Blake made the point you’re talking about.
The point under your blue f*/&% hat.
No, as stated, truck are an appropriate response. Spending more money is not just like throwing gas on the fire. If we had tax cuts, spending cuts and a balanced budget then we could discuss the appropriate course of action. Spending will only prolong the problem.
Your analogy is all wrong. If we were sending more of what we needed then it is different. We were (and are) in debt and the reason we had a meltdown is all the spending. So we threw more money at the problem and did more of what got us in trouble in the first place. For your analogy to work we would have to say that a house was on fire because some gasoline ignited. In order to put it out we threw more gasoline on it (the same thing that caused the problem) and then the rest of the block caught on fire but the original house (the source) burned out because all the fuel was consumed so we said that throwing more gas on the fire worked (after all, the original house went out) so we are going to throw more gas on the fire.
You are looking at the Keynesian theory of economics. It says to keep throwing money in there but that always fails. It leads to bigger problems.
Once again, I ask you to go through the list of spending and tell me how it stimulated anything. I also ask you if your wife maxed out her credit card and you were having trouble paying the bill would you give her another credit card so she could keep spending or would you cut back on her spending so you could get things under control?
“We were (and are) in debt and the reason we had a meltdown is all the spending.”
Hardly, but we’ve been through this before and I’m not sure it’s worth wasting much time on.
“I also ask you if your wife maxed out her credit card…”
First of all my wife doesn’t have a credit card. Second, you don’t believe fiscal stimulus works so I don’t expect you to understand why simply equating this to spending yourself out of debt is a simpleton’s example.
Japan has been trying to spend itself from a recession for almost twenty years with no success. Just because Obama is a mussy don’t expect him to be successful at that loser’s ploy.
Adam, you should try Amway! See how well spending yourself to riches really works. Go ahead, join in, make the circles, alienate your friends…oooops..you already did that…and buy a bunch of stuff you wont use. It is Obama and the stimulated package in a nut-sack.
You gave yourself away, pecker-wood, ‘believe (in) fiscal stimulus works,” is a call to faith just as Ann Coulter (God is great, Praise the Lord!)pointed out; Liberalism is a religion, and you are…one of the faithful!
What a sucker.
Spending is not a way out whether you expect me to understand or not. The credit card was a hypothetical but you make a good point. Take the credit card away and she cannot spend. Take the credit card away from Congress and they will not spend.
It is only a simpleton’s example to those who think the same rules for fiscal responsibility in the home are different than for the country. You fail to grasp the problem of debt and interest on that debt.
We have been through this before and, as you know, it has failed each time it was tried.
It isn’t a fire, bone-head.
Sorry Adam, he made it in another post where he made this comment:
But the TRUE culprits are the Eco- Nuts who insisted that the oil companies drill a mile below the surface of the ocean instead of in shallow water- in shallow water, this well would have been plugged by the third day, for sure, so the onus for this goes to the Greenie weirdos.
I was reviewing from the control panel and did not realize they were 2 different posts.
However, your comment does not make sense with regard to what he wrote here.
“However, your comment does not make sense with regard to what he wrote here.”
Really? Blake wrote here that Obama is purposefully not spending stimulus money to get votes and he purposefully let the oil spill get bad to punish red states. Compare that to his past claims that a “lefty” damaged the BOP to cause what is shaping up to be the biggest ecological disaster in the history of the world.
I would love to see a single shred of evidence for any of that garbage Blake spreads. But as we both know from reading Blake’s work over the last few years, he doesn’t rely on facts or verifiable information.
BD!
WOW! Of all the blogging out there, you did hit the nail on the head; this is is caused because of the greenflies refusal to allow rational development of energy for THEIR use.
I point my slippers in your general direction.