Thursday, January 15, 2009

Candy for everyone!

Via Townhall, here's a portion of the $825 billion (with a B) spending plan proposed by Congress:

-$6 billion to weatherize "modest income homes."
-$6 billion to provide internet in "underserved" areas
-$6 billion for "higher education modernization."
-$2.4 billion for carbon capture demonstration programs
-$500 million for energy efficient manufacturing demonstration projects.
-$1.5 billion for expanding "good jobs in biomedical research"
-$400 million "to put more scientists to work doing climate change research"
-$650 million to continue the coupon program to enable American households to convert from analog television transmission to digital transmission.
-$300 million for the National Wildlife Refuges and National Fish Hatcheries
-$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts

This is the inevitable result whenever there's a huge pile of money to be spent although this is money we're going to borrow from China to pile on the unfunded liabilities we already can't afford. Congress would do considerably less harm - and spend less money - by sticking to just one BIG idea. For $825 billion, you can send every American a check for $2750 to pay down credit card debt, save, or spend on stuff.

2 comments:

Jody said...

To be fair, 1) the DTV converter coupons is the payment side on something the US made a lot of money on (by auctioning off a good fraction of the vacated spectrum).

And 2) while I wouldn't normally call it "stimulus", those coupons will more than likely be spent by Feb 17 (the transition date) so it will at least satisfy the traditional stimulus goal of encouraging immediate spending.

The downside being, that's a bad industry to implicitly subsidize (if we are to call it a stimulus) as converter box demand will drop off a cliff at the end of February.

Anonymous said...

This is great! My house made very little money last year.