Congress Should Reject Trillion-Dollar “Stimulus” in Final Votes

Bill Smith, Editor, ARRA News Service, concurs with the assessment by Bill Wilson, President, Americans for Limited Government, regarding the proposed economic stimulus bill.

Members of the Congress should vote against the 1434-page trillion dollar spending bill currently being considered, urging lawmakers to go back to the drawing board and produce a bill that would actually stimulate growth of the economy, stabilize the financial system, and pay down the national debt.

The $30 million provision for wetland restoration to protect the salt marsh harvest mouse in San Francisco is a a symbol of the complete and utter waste of tax dollars contained in a bill which proponents claim will 'save' the economy.

Instead of 'saving' the economy, Congress, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is concerned with saving mice. The American people now know they've been lied to. There was supposed to be no pork in this bill. This could be a tipping point that causes the people to demand that this bill be pulled back and redrawn.

The proposed spending bill is a travesty in a period when the private sector shrinking, jobs being lost, and government spending exploding. The trillion dollar spending bill diverts precious, critical capital away from the private sector by dramatically and permanently increasing government spending, thereby increasing the financial burden government poses to the economy and to future generations.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) identified that the Senate version of the bill “will add $10,800 of debt to every American family…” when he cited a CBO report that predicts the legislation will cause our GDP to shrink over the long term. The current national debt nears $10.7 trillion, and the CBO-projected deficit without this legislation this year is $1.2 trillion.

Reid, Pelosi and others leaders of Congress are exploiting the economic crisis to pay off key political constituencies: state governments, public employee unions, transportation and construction unions, the environmental lobby, the education lobby, and of course, delivers hundreds of billions of pork all across the nation.

Congressional Democrats met over the past two days and arrived at the conference report, with the bill now totaling $789 billion, or $1.1 trillion after interest. It includes roughly $97 billion in new spending programs, and $92 billion of expansions of existing federal programs.

It also includes $53.6 billion for states to balance their budgets, $45 billion of which boosts education spending, $50 billion in green energy subsidies and tax credits, $55 billion for transportation projects, make groups like ACORN eligible for up to $2 billion in neighborhood stabilization funds, extends food stamps and unemployment benefits, builds federal buildings, provides more for public housing, constructs climate change supercomputers, erects trade barriers overseas, creates refundable tax credits, and provisions for high-speed Internet service.

Even though the House passed a motion on Tuesday allowing 48 hours for the conference report to be viewed publicly before being voted, it is doubtful that all members will have the opportunity to review the bill in detail. In their rush to claim they "did something," members of Congress and the President have missed a key opportunity to do the right thing.

What is needed is a massive reduction of the federal budget, a plan to pay off the national debt, permanent tax relief for businesses and individuals, the privatization of the mortgage industry, the abolition of the dual mandate at the Federal Reserve, and the elimination of public financing of consumer, business, student, and homeowner debt.

Congress has decided not to even address the root causes of the current economic calamity: easy money from the Fed coupled by the massive expansion of credit and lending. Instead it is boosting debt, setting an unsustainable baseline for future budgets, and of course, saving mice.

As detailed by The Heritage Foundation:

The United States Congress is about to pass the largest single-year increase in domestic federal spending since World War II. Despite the fact that neither the Republicans in Congress, the media, nor the American people have been allowed to read the bill, the House plans to vote on the plan. The Senate will quickly follow suit so that the bill will hit President Barack Obama's desk by Monday. Even without the full benefit of digesting what is in this trillion dollar debt bill, over 200 economists have expressed their belief that this plan is destined to fail. And conservative economists that once supported the idea of a stimulus are now calling the current plan "An $800 Billion Mistake." Even center left economists like President Bill Clinton’s budget director, Alice Rivlin have told Congress that the long-term spending items in the plan "should not be put together hastily and lumped in with the anti-recession package" . . .

There is nothing credibly temporary about the spending in this bill. The new welfare spending in this bill has already become the new budget baseline and anyone who dares to try pare it down is being attacked for "slashing" government funds. According to Heritage fellow Robert Rector, once this permanent new spending is factored in, the real cost of the plan balloons to $1.34 trillion.. . . According to the CBO the 2009 deficit will reach 8.3% of the economy, not including the stimulus or bank bailout cash. If you include the permanent nature of the stimulus spendathon, the deficit could hit nearly $2 trillion, or 13.5% of the U.S. economy. That is why the CBO [Democrat appointed CBO director Doug Elmendorf ]has predicted that this so-called stimulus bill will actually harm economic growth. . ..

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