Feb 12 2009
$789 Billion Stimulus Plan Passes Congress
The garguantuan spending plan put forth by the democratic held House and Senate have agreed on a final tally for the stimulus plan. $789 Billion dollars!! This is significantly less than the $900 billion + that was originally proposed by the White House. Either way this is a ton of money to be borrowing from countries like China, Russia etc. These countries are not exactly what I would consider “staunch allies”. This stimulus plan only serves to hurt us in the long run.
Why doesn’t anyone see this? This will come back to bite us years down the road I can guarantee that much. The massive amounts of money that our government is borrowing is unsustainable. Between the $750 billion for the TARP fund, and the $789 billion stimulus package, the government has spent over a TRILLION dollars already.. When does it stop? Not anytime soon and Ill tell you why. Timothy Geithner the treasury secretary has already said that his plan to “fix” the financial markets will cost in excess of $2.5 trillion dollars. He wasn’t even sure if his plan would work!! With two wars to fund and maintain, the era of massive government spending will continue for sometime.
What The Plan Will Grow
President Obama proclaims that this stimulus plans will grow the economy and create 3 to 4 million new jobs, I beg to differ. The only thing this stimulus bill is going to grow is the size of our already bloated federal government. With the government holding the purse strings, they will be able to dictate or influence what the money should be spent on. If you don’t believe me just take a look at the banking industry. The government has already partially nationalized banks with the TARP fund. President Obama limited the amount of money that CEO of the banking giants could make. This scares the crap out of me personally. Having the government tell you how much you can make sounds eerily like Soviet Russia. I never thought I would see the day where the government would have so much control over large swaths of our personal lives.
This stimulus plan will grow our national debt to new highs never seen before. This “stimulus” will create double digits interest rates and inflation. This stimulus plan will be put on the backs of me, you and future generations of Americans. I believe that this stimulus plan is selfish because it doesn’t take into consideration the prosperity of future generations.
Stimulus Doesn’t Work
Heavy government intervention in the market place does nothing to spur the creation of jobs in the economy. Tax cuts on the other hand are a tried and true way to stimulate the economy. How could any person honestly say that the government knows how to spend money the best? I found a good article about tax cuts and how they work to stimulate the economy. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/tax_cuts.asp also a good read if your interested. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/BG1660.cfm
Obama limiting CEO salaries is a good thing - it ends once they’ve paid the tax money they’re borrowing back…
obviously, as a libertarian, I’m not that happy about this massive spending either. In the lost decade the Japanese quadrupled their national debt using massive spending to try to get out of a recession… are we going to do the same thing?
Don’t you think that taxpayer’s (because that’s where this money came from) bailout money shouldn’t be used to give an already-wealthy CEO a bonus? The limited-salary would only last until they’ve repaid their debts.
How else does Obama show he’s not just handing it over no questions asked like Bush did? Plus those companies are in debt, so to speak, to the American people. They shouldn’t be allowed to operate business-as-usual because business-as-usual led all of us into this mess.
It is definitely for political standing, but the guy’s a politician.
I see what you mean about setting a dangerous precident too - if it hadn’t been for the fact that these companies remained solvent because of taxpayer money I would agree with you about the CEO’s. As socialism begins to root itself into our country more this isn’t a trend that I would like to see reoccurring.
Then again neither are corporate bailouts…
Well to be perfectly honest with you, these bailouts are bad and government controlling banks would be bad - to an extent. But we have to keep this completely relative here too.
Our banking system as it is, should be illegal. In fact, it is unconstitutional. The Federal Reserve runs with no regulation or oversight from congress and attaches debt to money even before it’s printed. Most of the money that they’re talking about isn’t even printed - it has to be loaned from the treasury to the fed to a fed bank to another bank to a person who is getting a loan - that’s the only time it becomes paper and at each of those steps more and more interest is being applied - meaning…
fake money is being made off of paper money - to the tune of about 35% - which ironically is about what they take in for the Federal Income Tax - which is also unconstitutional by the way.
In the 96 years the Federal Reserve has been in charge of our money it has lost over 96% of its value (meaning one dollar back then was worth over 20 of our today dollars). And with these latest surges of fake cash coming in you can expect that number to rise dramatically.