There is no evidence--- credible or otherwise from anyone--- that any of this will lead to "economic recovery." Even Obama acknowledges this.
Obama and the Democrats are tinkering, at best, with a problem they obviously know nothing about, other than, they want to make sure their corporate buddies who put up the big bucks for his campaign get their "pay-back."
If these people had even a modicum of concern for the plight of those being hurt the most by this economic depression--- or "downturn in the economy," "recession" or whatever one chooses to call what is happening--- the first priority would have been to put in place programs to help working people... the most hurt and hardest hit working people. Instead, Obama and the Democrats continue talking about helping "the middle class purchase new cars and homes with tax write-offs."
There are tens of thousands of unsold cars right now and no matter how big nor how many tax write-offs are given to the middle class car sales will only be a fraction of unsold vehicles.
As for first-time home purchases... what is this, some kind of sick joke? People making sixty-thousand dollars a year are losing their homes and tens of thousands of white-collar jobs have been lost in the auto industry. There are so many vacant homes the result of foreclosures and evictions with the middle class lucky to be able to afford to pay the heating bills for these homes if they were distributed free like quarter candy at Halloween.
What this article--- and Democrats and Republicans--- fail to mention, is that every single dollar spent on bombs and bullets steals away a dollar from this program--- a program that will exacerbate an already bad situation because it creates more debt. Debt equals greater poverty and all the misery associated with poverty.
Is the objective here to make life better for people or trying to save a system which can't be fixed simply because there is nothing wrong with the system. Capitalism is working just as is expected... we are at the bust part of the cycle of the boom-bust cycle from which capitalism cannot escape... there is no "fix" to a depression... as capitalism was growing and expanding through wars of thievery there was some wiggle room for the system to "rebound." That "wiggle room" is now gone. We are living in the most decadent, barbaric and cannibalistic stage of capitalism, its final imperialist stage... for working people there is no place to go but down; with capitalism on the skids to oblivion we are on the road to perdition... of course, if you can be dazzled by big bombs and bigger debts... Obama's "shock and awe" relating to the economy might be just as impressive as Bush's "shock and awe" in Iraq... in fact, Obama has indulged in the two greatest sins of all... expanded wars financed on borrowed money and increasing debt to bolster Wall Street profits... there are no two other ingredients as sure to destroy a nation and wreak havoc with working people's lives... there is no way for our grandchildren to pay for Obama's three wars and no way for them to repay the Wall Street bankers, either; so they will be far worse off than we are right now. This is "progress?"
This article talks about those dollars which will go right into wallets and right out again... what this article doesn't say is that in paying for Obama's three wars you might just as well take your wallet and its contents and toss it all into Lake Superior.
Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows--- and understands--- there is no return to society for a bullet coming from the barrel of a gun or in bombs dropped.
Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows--- and understands--- that you cannot spend 800 billion dollars on wars and turn around and spend another 800 billion dollars claiming to be "stimulating" the economy... because, at best, financially, you end up even; even, that is, until you figure out the price paid for borrowing money for each "endeavor"... once you factor the cost of financing these boon-doggles on borrowed money you find out very quickly what millions of home-owners have found out... you simply can't make it and the bank is going to take your home... well, in the same way these Wall Street banksters--- new kinds of gangsters--- are stealing our nation right out from under us with the help of Barack Obama and the Democrats.
Oh gees, what happens if we figure in what we could have done for people with this money being wasted on war? WoW! We wouldn't be talking about a "stimulus package" at all! We would be smiling with kids going to college and health care for all with everyone working.
We aren't supposed to be thinking about 800-billion dollars being squandered on wars while Obama is shoving an 800-billion dollar "stimulus package" down our throats... no doubt, this is why all of this had to be done so quickly before we put two and two together.
Capitalism can't be fixed; it can't be saved... what can you salvage from an apple rotten to the core? Nothing. You chuck it. If ever there was a system thoroughly rotten from greed, exploitation, unemployment, racism, poverty, pollution and wars it is American capitalism--- chuck it.
Not ready to chuck this rotten system? Well check out what Barack Obama and the Democrats are giving you for a life-time of hard work under the guise of "economic stimulus:"
"The stimulus plan will mean thousands of dollars in tax breaks for first-time home buyers and people buying new cars. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers will get an extra $13 a week in their paychecks this year, and about $8 a week next year. Unemployment checks will go up $25 a week, and keep coming longer. Food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans will rise. Short-term health insurance will become more affordable for many losing their jobs."
These people must think we are completely stupid or something. They don't even have the common decency to mention that over 60 million people in this country are already so poor they don't have to file tax returns... what do they get from Obama's "stimulus" package? Shit.
And then we get this crap...
"The success of the stimulus package may be measured less by visible achievements than by what does not happen — the home that is not foreclosed, the family that doesn't slip into poverty, the disease that does not go undiagnosed."
So, now we measure "success" in terms of that which is unknown and unmeasurable with the same kind of accountability we get from these same dirty politicians who use voice votes to escape accountability.
We are supposed to ignore the rising numbers of people living in poverty and be satisfied as long as there are more people living in homes than are homeless; we are supposed to be happy there are more people employed than unemployed. What kind of convoluted logic is this? The same kind of convoluted logic that allowed Barack Obama to remain silent as Israel carried out a bestial killing spree and 22-day pogrom against the Palestinian people financed with billions our tax-dollars which should have been spent on a public health care system.
The convoluted logic being used to defend Israel's carnage is the same convoluted logic we are now told we must use to measure the success of this so-called "stimulus plan."
We are supposed to look at each and every aspect of how things are done, and at life in America as unrelated to one another... because, to look at the big picture one sees nothing but a system rotten to the core and the last thing the capitalist sooth-Sayers want us to think about doing is chucking a thoroughly rotten system.
"Poof — you just lost $15,000 that legislators had considered providing."
"Poof?"
Poof; some Palestinian child just lost their mother. Poof; some Palestinian mother just lost her children. Poof; someone just lost their home. Poof; some worker just lost her/his job. Poof; someone just died because they couldn't afford health care. Poof; someone just lost their pension fund. Poof; a bridge collapsed. Poof; someone just died from contaminated peanut butter. Poof; some homeless person just froze to death. Poof; some kid couldn't afford to continue in college. Poof; twenty-two poor suckers living in caves in Pakistan because they were too poor to live in a real home were killed by an un-manned drone in Pakistan because only terrorists live in caves.
What the hell... are we supposed to look at what Israel just did in Gaza with our tax-dollars and chalk that up to "shock and awe," too?
Poof; Barack Obama has destroyed an entire nation in less than a month giving us bullets to bite on!
Alan L. Maki
By NANCY BENAC and CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writers Nancy Benac And Calvin Woodward, Associated Press Writers – Sat Feb 14, 9:44 am ET
WASHINGTON – America is bringing shock and awe to the home front, using dollars instead of bombs.
It's the military doctrine of lightning force — fast and brute, or as brute as the shaken country can manage — applied to the campaign for economic recovery.
With a record-busting stimulus plan, the U.S. is marshaling resources against economic catastrophe in ways not seen since Franklin Roosevelt put the New Deal in motion.
President Barack Obama is going with the best deal he could get. The stimulus bill is a landmark legislative achievement for a new president who inherited economic spoilage along with the spoils of power. Now the nation anxiously waits to see if it works.
Undermining federal balance sheets that were already deeply in the red, Obama and Congress settled on a nearly $800 billion plan that aims to spend more on the crisis at hand than the government has spent waging the Iraq war for six years.
The idea: fast cash, and lots of it, but with a strategic view to the future.
Some dollars will flow quickly into wallets — and right out again.
The stimulus plan will mean thousands of dollars in tax breaks for first-time home buyers and people buying new cars. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers will get an extra $13 a week in their paychecks this year, and about $8 a week next year. Unemployment checks will go up $25 a week, and keep coming longer. Food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans will rise. Short-term health insurance will become more affordable for many losing their jobs.
The success of the stimulus package may be measured less by visible achievements than by what does not happen — the home that is not foreclosed, the family that doesn't slip into poverty, the disease that does not go undiagnosed.
"The one thing we'll never know is what would have happened if we didn't do it," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight.
It's not FDR's deal and these aren't his times.
No federally subsidized artists will paint murals glorifying the muscle of American workers or the progress belching from smokestacks, as they did in Roosevelt's day.
No grand compact is to be formed between generations like the one that promised everyone a federal pension. No institutions will rise to try something brand new.
"We're not reinventing government," said historian Kenneth C. Davis, author of the best-selling "Don't Know Much About" series. "We're modifying things that exist."
Yet as the share of the economy taken up by federal spending rises to an anticipated 30 percent, the nation is grappling again with big questions about Washington's place in people's lives.
"The stakes are so high now, this is such a big bill, average Americans are following it," says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. "It's become a bill that is an argument about what government can or can't do.
"If there is no effect and in six months we are talking about the same economy or a worse economy, I think it would be a devastating blow to the president, Democrats, and to liberal claims about what government can do."
To critics such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the package is the "Europeanization of America." Others call it "Rooseveltian" or "generational theft" in reference to the debt passed on to the future.
They might envision murals glorifying little more than filled potholes, insulated windows, depreciated computers.
Obama said it's about more than that, and drew parallels with FDR in speaking Friday to the Business Council, formed by corporate leaders in the 1930s to advise Roosevelt's administration.
"We adapted, we changed," he said about those days — and these. "President Roosevelt understood the new role of government in this new world, that while extraordinary actions on its part might be the source of recovery, no action on the part of government, no matter how extraordinary, would alone be the source of our prosperity."
In his radio address Saturday, Obama said he believed the country "will turn this crisis into opportunity and emerge from our painful present into a brighter future."
Democrats and just enough Republicans in Congress — three — saw the package as the best chance to tamp down the economic wildfires breaking out across the landscape.
Obama came into office saying he wished to be judged on his first 1,000 days instead of the usual benchmark of 100. In some ways he will be judged on his first 10 or 20.
Not even Roosevelt, fast off the mark to deal with a bank crisis, was as fast as this in achieving something so sweeping, so early.
The enormity of the package left politicians grasping for concrete ways to convey its size.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., spoke of a stack of hundred-dollar bills 689 miles high, and of bills wrapped side-by-side that would encircle the Earth nearly 39 times. House Republicans predicted that the package's costs — with interest on the necessary borrowing — could total more than a trillion dollars, enough money to buy about 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every American.
It was enough to prompt comic Jon Stewart to riff that if you sewed the $100 bills together, "you would make a blanket for Jupiter."
The stimulus wasn't just about throwing cash at the economy, though.
The package is filled with billions for some of the same goals that Obama preached about on the presidential campaign trail — renewable energy and green jobs, computerized medical records, broadband Internet service for underserved areas.
"There are seeds in this bill for long-term change," says Zelizer. "There are things that can develop out of the research that can change our lives."
Obama sounded a drumbeat of warnings about the consequences of failing to act. But Americans didn't need their president to tell them how grim the economic situation was — and could become.
Forty percent of Americans already have been affected by some sort of job problem in the past year, be it unemployment, underemployment, layoffs, reductions in pay or hours, or job losses by members of their households, according to a poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center. Fifty-six percent expect things to be worse or about the same a year from now — and they've got solid grounds for their pessimism.
The country could well suffer a net loss of 2 million to 3 million or more jobs this year, economists believe. And the unemployment rate, now 7.6 percent, could top 9 percent by spring of 2010.
The stimulus pull-together was a colossal game of winners and losers shaped and reshaped by the latest set of hands on the package. The fortunes of people, schools, towns and other varied interests rose and fell in blinks of time.
Ready to buy another home?
Poof — you just lost $15,000 that legislators had considered providing.
Buying a first home? You're still in luck — the government plans to give you an $8,000 credit if you buy by the end of November.
A new car? You'll be able to deduct the thousands in sales taxes from your income tax but not — as was initially proposed — your loan interest as well.
One day, the government proposed to pay 65 percent of the cost of health coverage for a year for jobless people who lose their workplace insurance. Days later, it was down to half. Ultimately, the subsidy zigzagged back up to 65 percent, but it expires before the end of the year.
Obama declared an end to pork-barrel politics, but legislators still managed to look out for favorite projects.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was quick to point out that a big chunk of the $8 billion set aside to construct high-speed rail lines could go to a proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas route. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., helped make sure $10 billion was set aside for the National Institutes of Health, a priority of his.
Long after the dust has settled from the horse trading, the government will be seen to have moved with unaccustomed speed on policies normally subjected to years of deliberation and gridlock.
Deficit hawks found their wings clipped as both parties reached for the treasury. Democrats mainly wished to spend; Republicans, mainly to cut taxes.
After last November, guess who got their way?
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said flatly: "We won the election; we wrote the bill."
The debate was both large and small. Negotiators considered the proper role of government — and how fast a business can depreciate its equipment.
Entering the 1930s, Americans mainly saw the national government as the entity that fought wars, ran post offices and enforced a ban on liquor. Federal spending was only 3.4 percent of the economy.
That more than tripled during the New Deal, topping 10 percent, because of the explosion of public works and other labor programs, rural modernization, bank support, and farm and industrial aid.
"It was a transformation of society in a way that hadn't been done since the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery," Davis said.
The government became the entity that guaranteed a minimum wage, controlled farm production, supported artists, set workplace standards, insured deposits in regulated banks and cast the first national safety net for the elderly and handicapped under Social Security.
"The whole scope of what Roosevelt was trying to do is different but the intent is clearly the same: relief and recovery during a time of economic stress," said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The package won by Obama offers "very important but more subterranean changes in the way the economy works," he said.
Federal spending as a share of the economy shot above 40 percent during World War II and has hovered around 20 percent most of the years since. That share was already projected to approach 25 percent before Obama's stimulus plan.
To be sure, there's still considerable disagreement about how much the New Deal helped to end a depression finally crushed by the humming factories of World War II.
Even FDR's transformation of the federal government was not universally recognized at the time for what it was. It may be years before the full measure of Obama's efforts are taken, too.
In 1936, The Economist magazine pronounced the New Deal a "striking success" in improving conditions that existed when FDR took office three years earlier.
But what of the legacy?
What legacy?
"If the criterion be Utopian, the achievements of the New Deal appear to be small," the editors sniffed. "The great problems of the country are hardly touched."
___
Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
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