My syndicated column today pounds the drum again on the Generational Theft Act of 2009. As I noted two weeks ago, much of this crappiest crap sandwich ever wouldn’t even be spent until the catastrophe it’s supposed to cure is mostly over. Team Obama sent David Axelrod out yesterday to pooh-pooh the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis. But Democrat opposition to the bill is building. Some, like Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), want more government intrusion on behalf of home borrowers under water on their mortgages. But others, including Rep. Heath Shuler and Sen. Kent Conrad mentioned below, are starting to get queasy about the size, scope, and ineffectiveness of the deal.
Where are Republicans? Weakenedand struggling to figure out how to be the party of opposition instead of the party of supplication.
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And now, back to our regularly scheduled spending orgy
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008
“The time has come,” President Barack Obama told us in his inaugural address, “to set aside childish things.” He borrowed the line from Corinithians. With the Beltway bread-and-circus show over, President Obama will now get to work on borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from you, your children, and your grandchildren for a doomed fiscal stimulus.
As President Obama basked in the inaugural glow, a dark cloud of reality moved in over the Democrats’ $825 trillion plan to rescue the economy. The Congressional Budget Office crunched the numbers and concluded that a huge bulk of the federal spending orgy wouldn’t actually kick in until the recession is waning – if not already over.
The CBO analysis showed that “less than half of the $30 billion in highway construction funds detailed by House Democrats would be released into the economy over the next four years” and “less than $4 billion in highway construction money would reach the economy by September 2010,” according to the Associated Press. And those are generous time estimates given the reality of molasses-slow bidding and contracting processes — bogged down by the usual weight of political wrangling, racial-bean-counting, and assorted union grievance-mongering. Continue reading . . .
