Congress' Clueless Credit System
Chuck Norris
Date: Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 5:41 AM
Subject: Chuck Norris: Congress' Clueless Credit System
To:
There they go again! The House and Senate have buried us in yet another bailout-stimulus heaping pile of fiscal dung -- a $789 billion loan that has been tacked onto our children's (and children's children's) already staggering $10-plus trillion deficit. Are you just going to sit there and take another one up the tailpipe?
Though President Obama emphatically declared that this 1100-page piece of legislation does not contain "a single pet project, not a single earmark," it's full of some type of financial fluff. Call it what you will, but few knew recessionary needs included $2 billion for battery companies, $2 billion for the National Parks Service, $2.3 billion for NASA and the National Science Foundation, $1.1 billion for airport improvements, $850 million for Amtrak, $800 million for federal prison construction, $300 million for additions to the federal fleet, $200 million for new Department of Agriculture buildings, $165 million for fish hatcheries, $100 million for the FBI, $100 million for shipyards, $50 million for an arts endowment, etc. (A detailed list of the stimulus package expenditures can be reviewed on the website of Patton Boggs legal firm at www.pattonboggs.com.)
Should I just shut up and be grateful that Republicans squashed the $200 million to re-sod the National Mall in Washington and purchase a new Coast Guard polar icebreaker? Sure tastes like the same ol' partisan and political punch to me. (Remember when, in 1988, President Reagan vetoed a bill because it had six earmarks in it?)
And what about you? The average hardworking American citizen? The middle-class blue-collar worker? You'll get a whopping $13 increase to your paycheck. Now there's change (as in coins) we can believe in. And we'll have to believe, because only faith and a miracle will turn that $13 increase into a catalyst to jump-start the economy. Is that the change you were hoping for?
The Financial Meltdown: Is Capitalism the Culprit?
The media tell us that "deregulation" and "unfettered free markets" brought our nation to the brink of financial ruin. That's nonsense. The real blame lies elsewhere...
In Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, bestselling author Thomas E. Woods Jr. exposes the real causes behind the collapse of housing values and the stock market - and it turns out the culprits reside more in Washington than on Wall Street.