Decision Making 2009 Stimulus Package Essay

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History tells us, evidently, that the worse a slump, the quicker the recovery because there's nowhere else to go but up. The rebounds from a bad economy were very strong. Now there's something to look forward to for those millions of Americans who can't put bread on the table for their kids.

But, why is the stimulus not working all that well. In actuality, the government threw in around $800 billion for President Obama's Recover and Reinvestment Act of 2009. How could it not work? Because it spent money on the wrong things. Remember when we were told all the wonderful new green investments it would allow to create thousands of jobs. And, do you recall how it would bring the U.S. transportation system up-to-date with highway and bridge repairs?

Pork. That's what happened, plus huge support for existing social programs which brought zero new jobs. The Wall Street Journal calls the stimulus "a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years" (Dwinnell, 2009). Too much spending and not enough tax cuts to get money back into the American public's pockets. That's the complaint.

The Christian Science Monitor makes the point that just $24 billion can be directly apportioned to green investments. That amounts to about $16 billion in tax breaks and $8 billion in loans.

Bottom line without listing the many billions spent that won't create jobs is that about 12% of the stimulus package can be considered a growth stimulus (Dwinnell, 2009).

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Hundreds of billions of pork. $260 billion of "discretionary" spending. That's what they call pork these days. Divide the official total stimulus package cost of $787 billion by $260 billion and you come up with 33%. The tax relief in the bill amounts to 34% -- that's the good stuff. So, one-third of the total stimulus package goes for items such as: green (electric) golf carts, $98 million for a U.S. Coast Guard polar icebreaker, $200 million to "design and furnish" the Department of Homeland Security headquarters, $3.4 billion on "clean coal" which won't do anything anytime soon, and, finally, "mystery meat" which consists of $144 billion that flows directly to states and cities for unnamed projects. In Austin, Texas, for example, an $886,000, 36-hole Frisbee golf course was on the list but not allowed due to a technicality (Bandyk,

However, the $150 million for a parking lot improvement at a Little League ballpark in Cidra, Puerto Rico passes muster, as does $6 million for "snowmaking and maintenance" at a ski area in Minnesota. And that polar icebreaker for the Coast Guard? They already have three of them fully capable of breaking up ice (Bandyk,

The value of these perspectives on the stimulus package is that they come from a variety of sources with divergent political views. But their overall goal is to put the spending and the creation (or not) of jobs in light of the American public's interest. The issues are debatable.

Facts are facts, and that is what we have tried to.....

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