Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 6:07:45 PM
That's all there is? $250 billion of tax refunds (on next year's tax return)? That is, EITC extensions for people who don't pay any federal taxes, posed as tax cuts. That is, taking the whole group of stipends and labelling it a "net tax cut". This is what you get when a lawyer is in charge.
What is the rest? A giant pork program. Go look at it, it ain't hard to find. Subsidies for smoking cessation programs. Birth control programs. General funding for "education", without any time or stipulation.
And what happens when you question all this? You get a lecture about how people are hurting. How thousands are being laid off as we speak. And if an enterprising reporter asks how a smoking cessation program is going to help the newly jobless, we all aren't "looking at the big picture".
This is all there is to the Obama magic? After all the carping and moaning about Bush's deficit spending, to load us for another trillion dollars full of Democrat Congressional pork, and then do the Obama soft shoe song and dance about his concern for the downtrodden?
Oh, yeah, that's enough for me. I learned my lesson from Paulson last year. The original stimulus was supposed to be a fund that would target the bad mortgage assets in the credit industry, the notion being that once those assets were neutralized, the balance sheets would normalize. This actually made a bit of sense.
So we shovelled a few hundred billion dollars at them, and we weren't allowed to even ask how they spent it.
So now you want more? Screw that! Pardon me for being un-American, but I'm not up to putting any money in Obama's hat.