The No Stimulus Bill
We are told that Bush hails tax-rebate deal as ‘robust’, when what we find is another corporate welfare bill that will do nothing for the economy of the nation. They promised Viagra® and provided a saccharine tablet, not even real sugar.
Paul Krugman has two posts on the placebo that the House is pushing: Why worry about a poor stimulus plan? and Stimulus disappointment.
They cleared the calendar of the House to work on this nothing of a bill that increases the national debt and will be too little and too late to have any effect on the economy. Perhaps if we took the $169,300 annual salaries of the members of Congress and made them live on the $32,140 median income of the American worker, they might have more appreciation of the problems faced by the people in a recession.
As the median income, it means that half of all working Americans make less than that, while half make more. That is the middle of the middle class workers these days.
By the way, that $250 billion dollar deficit they are reporting for this year, that doesn’t include the other $250 billion that was “borrowed” from the Social Security trust fund.
4 comments
Probably should take away the taxpayer funded health insurance as well. Very disappointed in what they have come up with. Maybe the Senate will do the right thing.
OT. Since I have been working in the office and inside the corporate firewall you are one of the sites that are blocked. Your crime = Games. Mustang Bobby is blocked for “Gay and lesbian issues as is Americablog. Plus no YouTube or equivalent is allowed either.
OT: There is a gamer who uses the name “whynow”, and is prolific on all of the boards if Google is to be believed, so that does make some sense, as well as indicating a weakness in the filters. I’ve run across the situation before.
Congress costs $90.6 million for base salaries, which is kind of absurd and rather isolating. They only need 5 years to be vested in their retirement system, another absurdity.
More layoffs with give them a feel for the real world.
I seriously doubt this stimulus package is going to stimulate much new spending. It’s not being directed at the people who spend every dime they have just to exist. People who aren’t buying new things because they can’t.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict many of the recipients are going to either pay off some bills or stash it in their savings. Mine is going directly into my IRA account because I have no company pension and am not looking forward to surviving on social security, if it even exists when I retire. That’s my priority, not new clothes or more toys.
What we need is job creation, good jobs, not more spending on junk made in other countries. Didn’t all that spending get us into this mess in the first place? At some point Americans are going to have to accept a lower standard of living. Wants vs. needs. It’s not going to be pretty or painless.
Down here the housing “boom” was all about vacation and retirement homes because the local working people can’t afford what they were building. Not only do the local wages not provide the money to buy them, they don’t provide the money to rent them. We have banks cruising to find buyers willing to pay 60% of the construction loans that built many of them – not the final price, just the construction loans.
Social Security will be there, but something has to be done about Medicare, and universal health care is the best and easiest solution.
It’s time to dust off the CCC and WPA to get people back to work and money circulating. Business is not going to expand until there are customers, and there aren’t going to be customers until there are jobs. It always starts with jobs.
There is a lot of infrastructure that needs rebuilding and we have the laid-off contractors and construction workers who need the jobs.