Aren’t there any new ideas in the Stimulus?
“Sacred cows” is Nelson’s polite phrase for earmark-like projects, sacred to members, like $400 million for sexually transmitted disease prevention, $350 million for computers at the USDA, $14 million for cyber security and millions for NASA research.“They’re good programs, but they just don’t belong, in our opinion, in a stimulus package,” Nelson told FOX News, saying that, instead, members should look to the next spending bill in the pipeline, an omnibus appropriations bill that funds federal agencies for 2009, a measure that was postponed from last year.
A week ago, the republicans put out a list of what they considered waste in the stimulus bill. I’ve tried reading the bill approved by the house and found it daunting. What stood out most was not the individual programs proposed (nothing is revolutionary), but the dollar amounts applied to them. There are oversight committees that are getting anywhere from $350,000,000 to $500,000,000 for management costs alone. Now, some of these programs are active until 2011, but consider that on the low end - 2 years, $350,000,000. That’s a budget of $116,000,000 a year for staff and office space. If my company had revenue like that, I’d be living in a mansion on the ocean.
Very likely, these programs will have staffs of maybe 50, which means there will be an enormous amount of waste. Beyond that, most of your congress people and senators will not even read this 650 something page document, so all they will be concerning themselves with is the expenditures to their state.
Personally, I think it is the duty of everyone of our representatives to read through this document thoroughly and understand the broader scope of what is needed. It’s fine to know the small details, but it must be within the context of a bigger picture.
There is also alot of garbage in this package and it leaves me shaking my head as to why these people can’t come up with anything NEW. With the kind of money being thrown around, you’d think they could hire the best minds to find the most unique ideas on how to stimulate this economy beyond the standards proposed in Roosevelts New Deal and the obligatory tax cuts.
