Policy Stinks

Policy STINKS! I don’t need no stinking stimulus…if it’s like this

I was critical of the stimulus plan from DAY ONE. The CBO scored it poorly. My point was and is that the plan had more ‘agenda’ than ‘stimulus’. So, one big Bronx cheer for Democrats that packed a roughly $850bln plan with stuff that was Democrat or friends-of-Democrat (FOD) friendly. More and more it’s looking like they spent a TON of (our!) money with little effect-sound familiar? Republicans do not have the patent on that! And- as you would expect the Democrat’s tack is to blame Republicans for it… (oh, their recession is worse than we thought. But in doing this don’t forget the role of the House and Senate ‘banking committees’ in making and changing the rules that destabilized markets since they each were headed by…Democrats). I hope no one let’s them off the hook for this. ALL politicians are the SAME. We have ONE party in America and it is run by the lobbyists. Moreover, just as the stimulus plan was crude and half-hearted from the start, the President, all on his own, has been reluctant to be a positive force. He has sourly met even pieces of good news. Then he switched his interest to health care reform and has been trying to sell THAT as an economic stimulus plan (sorry, that’s pretty lame, even if we like you).

Yeah! We lose the Olympics and gain a modicum of fiscal respectability - And then Mr O took time out to go to Denmark to plump for one of the biggest money losing schemes in the world that comes periodically (well second to the money spent and misallocated in election year cycles anyway), The Olympics! Why was that so important? Is Chicago in such great fiscal shape that it wanted to lose $6bln or so by staging the games? Or since Barack is from there, did Chicago think it could toddle right over to DC and Mr O would arrange for them to get the money from us? So Rio ‘won’ the Olympics...did it really win or did it just get stuck for the bill at the next global sports party? Hey, party in Rio, Lula’s buying!