We’re back to the same old problems with government spending, as always they include a myriad of unnecessary and/or irrelevant items. In this case the term ‘emergency’ is being used very loosely as much of the planned spending doesn’t occur for another two years. The Wall Street Journal Reports in its article The Stimulus Time Machine…
According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, a mere $26 billion of the House stimulus bill’s $355 billion in new spending would actually be spent in the current fiscal year, and just $110 billion would be spent by the end of 2010. This is highly embarrassing given that Congress’s justification for passing this bill so urgently is to help the economy right now, if not sooner.
The honest solution is to stick to spending money on only what truly constitutes an economic emergency. Report after report have come out detailing all the unnecessary expenditures in this bill like cable TV converter boxes. The spin put on this stimulus bill is that the economy is too confusing to understand and everything that can be done needs to be done now. So lets simplify. Somebody has to pay for that trillion dollars in spending. As we’ve just seen with the credit crunch, eventually your bill will become due and you have to pay up, and it’s the American taxpayer who has to pay that bill in the end. So why not keep it simple and create an emergency bill that deals with this year’s necessities, and leave all that other spending for an appropriations bill to be debated in the normal course of events. Seems like that would be a more practical and a more honest solution.
