Fact Check: Pork or Earmarks?

[DavidS]

Oh Boy. If the revenue required to create that job exceeds the financial benefit of said job, it is a negative impact on the economy - thus, NOT stimulus.

How do you calculate the financial benefit of that job? The whole idea behind trickle down theory is that if you give people more money, they will spend it. Instead of cutting income to the government in the form of tax cuts which do nothing for people without jobs, you're giving this person a job and a salary. Well, not directly. But how do you even begin to calculate what kind of negative or positive effect this is going to have on our economy?

This is one of the primary contentions many economists are having with this bill.

Actually, Paul Krugmen, you know the nobel prize winner, says that the government isn't spending enough money.

 

[DavidS]

Those things are covered in the normal budget david, and are reviewed by the comittes for them, they are not 'stimulus.'

The bill is supposed to jump start the economy, and it can't be done by spending money we don't have.

Anything that creates a job is stimulus. That person's salary will be used to by food at the grocery store, drugs at the drug store, gas at the gas station, clothes at the clothing store, on and so on. And if there isn't enough money in a state's budget to build that nursing home then yes, it's pork, but it's not wasteful. It's beneficial.

We don't have another choice - if we stop spending, then our economy collapses. Then what's to stop Russia from attacking us and trying to make us the U.S.S.A?

why would Russia need to attack us and make us that when the road we are on is taking us there now

We're not heading towards socialism.

We have two options, though:

Remember what started the tailspin, what got this economy so badly beaten down? Lehman Brothers collapsing and the government refusing to bail it out. Our economy was bad before this, but we had no idea how bad it was going to get. We had been pummeled earlier last year by soaring gas prices and a housing market that was doing terrible. Gas prices were eventually going to go down and the housing market was going to recover. This is what we all thought. Then Lehman Brothers collapsed and we had mid September through Thanksgiving worth of collapses and crashes and major volatility on Wall Street. Major companies started cutting tens of thousands of jobs and unemployment sky rocketed.

Now magnify that 100 times. Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Golaman Sachs, Wells Fargo, etc. millions of jobs, gone, the biggest banks and investment firms, gone.

These firms needed money and the only place to go to get that kind of money is the US government. So we bailed them out and gave them money. If we hadn't done that and would have let each and every one of those places go out of business, the stock market and our economy would be worthless right now. Absolutely 100% worthless.

So the government gave these people money and will continue to do so until these companies are back where they were two years ago. But they will owe money to the government and until they repay that money to the government the CEO's and the execs can't make a certain amount of money. Boo hoo. That's not socialism. Shared ownership of a company between the company and the government is still capitalism. If the government owned it completely it would be a hybrid of capitalism and communism. The government has no intention of doing that.

Socialism is an equal cooperative ownership of a company by private citizens. A company is created based upon the social value of a product or service. We are so far away from that it isn't funny.

 

[Red Dawn]

I'm still waiting for the Change You Can Hope For mantra to pick up steam. Why can we not seem to pass a bill or stimulus package without added "pork" to it? If you want to truly help the economy and the nation, then pass a stimulus package where the items included in the package go towards stimulating the economy or making every American better off. Selective rewards and "pork" projects are not going to motivate the average citizen to go out and spend their hard earned money.

Here is a link to an AP article that conducts some fact checking on this bill and Obama's characterizations of it. Fact Check: Obama has it both ways on pork

And to think this article did not originate from the Fox News site, what is the AP thinking.

I'm going to assume you voted for bush twice, supported the iraq war, defended bush to the hilt even as liberals were screaming that we were headed for a cliff, and stood by in dead silence as your party nominated bush as the "best" your party had to offer....twice, in two GOP nominations.



We tried it your way. Relentless tax cut bill after tax cut bill, year after year, primarily directed at the weatlhy and corporations. Years of chanting the GOP mantra that government should get out of the way, and deregulae the markets and wall street.

Your way has put us on the edge of a second great Republican depression.

so you can sit down in the back of the bus and stfu. Your advice isn't worth shit.

 

[DiamondDave]

Idiot...

We don't have a depression #1.. #2 There was no first "great republican depression".... #3 Everything that Bush or that administration or congress did from 2001 til now does not make things "our" way... You still have a strong conservative base that is not a neo-con base that is screaming for reduction in taxes and fair taxes across the board, combined with trimming government spending (especially on wasteful entitlements and the typical pork we see constantly) and trimming down the government itself... #4 Even knowing all the things Bush did that I disagreed with, I would still vote for him again over Gore or Kerry (he was not my choice in the primaries in 2000, but was less of an evil than Gore.. and Kerry in 2004 was a fucking joke)

Many would rather that you and your extreme partisan ilk STFU