$2 Billion For Broadband Cut From Stimulus Bill

pdabbadabba points out a CNN report on changes to the planned economic stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [PDF]) that will remove the $2 billion allocated to broadband development. The changes also eliminated smaller amounts allocated to NASA, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and the National Science Foundation. $16 billion in school construction funding was removed, as well as another $3.5 billion for higher education construction. A variety of environmental projects were also cut or reduced (half of the $7 billion set aside for energy-efficient federal buildings, half of the $600 million for hybrid federal vehicles), and over $8 billion in health-related provisions are gone. The bill will likely go to vote in the Senate on Tuesday.

Comments

Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists

[Delwin]

I don't see stimulating the economy listed as a federal government responsibility in the Constitution

"Promote the general welfare"

Re:Great

[jmulvey]

I think one of the worst things that republicans have done to this country is to make people feel educated on a subject after ingesting a few sound bites.

Then read this in-depth article on education costs run amok in New Jersey. It's fascinating (and not boring) reading. Unfortunately it will pop your misconcpetions about how well-spent our education dollar is. Maybe after reading this, you can give us a soundbite or two about how spending $500,000 per graduating high school student is good for the taxpayer.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_new_jersey.html

Re:Actually

[Daswolfen]

Except if you bothered to pay attention even the congressional budget office said that the stimulus bill if passed will do more to hurt the economy in the long term over doing nothing.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/04/cbo-obama-stimulus-harmful-over-long-haul/

Wake up Sheeple. You are perfectly willing to sit and listen to what 'Dear Leader' says. You listen to the talking heads regurgitate what better suits the Obama agenda and eat it up like its chocolate ice cream on a hot summer day. Just like the global warming crap. You take Al Gore's word that the sky is falling and we need to all drive Prius and eat vegan or we are going to be extinct by summer. You listen to them say there is a consensus on man made global warming when the truth is the only consensus is that the climate is changing, like it has done for the last 4.5 billion years.

Please, get a clue. Wake up. Take the Red Pill.

DO SOMETHING. Don't blindly follow the Pied Piper to our doom.

Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists

[Anonymous Coward]

> You can ALWAYS count on stimulating an economy of the US's size by reducing taxation.

Yeah, so maybe not. Look up the velocity of money, which has fallen through the floor in the last few months. What that means is that people are essentially stuffing their mattresses, and any additional tax cuts will, in fact, not be stimulative. So you need to directly stimulate - and that means spend.

See this:

http://www.urbandigs.com/2008/12/you_want_to_see_what_deflation.html

Also take a good, long, hard look at deflation and what that means, especially in relation to potential tax cuts. Arguably, we are in a deflationary spiral right now.

Re:no soup!

[beckerist]

More recent PDF (with some newer changes)
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/020209econbill.pdf

FTA:

Partially cut:
* $3.5 billion for energy-efficient federal buildings (original bill $7 billion)
* $75 million from Smithsonian (original bill $150 million)
* $200 million from Environmental Protection Agency Superfund (original bill $800 million)
* $100 million from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (original bill $427 million)


Fully eliminated:
* $55 million for historic preservation
* $50 million for Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service
* $98 million for school nutrition
* $2 billion for broadband
* $100 million for National Institute of Standards and Technology
* $50 million for NASA
* $50 million for aeronautics
* $50 million for exploration
* $200 million for National Science Foundation
* $100 MILLION FOR SCIENCE
* $25 million for Fish and Wildlife
* $55 million for historic preservation
* $90 million for State and Private Wildlife Fire Management
* $16 billion for school construction
* $3.5 billion for higher education construction
~~~
YES I read the entire link I posted (took me just over an hour) and it just seems to me that everything cut was everything Obama promised to keep, and everything kept was what Obama was against when he was running.
OK so my actual question after all of this is this: Why are we cutting sciences yet throwing hundreds of billions of dollars towards the military still (see article X in the linked article.) I'm not an economist, I just noticed a very ugly trend in the above documents and would like someone with a bit more economic experience to explain (please!)

Re:Do you know who is paying for this?

[artor3]

My god.... you actually believe you're doing this math correctly?

If the top 5% pay that much, that makes up $479.5B. The top 10%, according to you, pay a total of $560B. That means that the second highest 5% would pay ~$80B, which, divided over 7M people is about $11,400, which is in direct contradiction to your earlier assertion that someone making $109K would pay $40,000.

To put it simply, you're full of shit, and don't know even the slightest thing about math.

Spot On !

[tuxgeek]

Yes, you have just seized the senator by the balls there.
There are still enough corrupt asshats left in congress to block any and all good ideas to put people back to work. They are still stuck with the idea that tax cuts solve all problems, but are too short sighted to realize that the last 8 years of tax cuts and outsourcing jobs overseas are what got us here in the first place.

I do not hold the republicans solely @ fault here though. The dem side has sought to put plenty of wasteful pork like "Family Planning" crap in their bills as well. I also don't think much of Obama's idea to give 1K to the poor that don't even earn enough to pay taxes @ all. Give them jobs so they earn enough to pay taxes. Give them a shovel and a road to build. What's so hard about that?

All these people just don't get it at all. Everyone in America needs to write their senators and representatives, both republican and democrat, and demand they get with the program and write legislation that will put money into the hands of the working class in the form of jobs and tax cuts. People need to feel warm and fuzzy enough to spend money on new homes and consumer goods. Only that will turn the economy around.
Tax cuts for billionaires won't work, they never have, they never will.Many here don't realize the 2001 (republican) congress with a republican president are the ones that authored all the shady legislation (think derivatives and other stupid ideas) that snowballed into the recent global economic crash.

Re:Who is the bloodsucker?

[DigiShaman]

From NY Times (Sept 30th 1999) by By STEVEN A. HOLMES.

Original links here and here

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''

Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''

Under Fannie Mae's pilot program, consumers who qualify can secure a mortgage with an interest rate one percentage point above that of a conventional, 30-year fixed rate mortgage of less than $240,000 -- a rate that currently averages about 7.76 per cent. If the borrower makes his or her monthly payments on time for two years, the one percentage point premium is dropped.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.

No, it was socialism that got us into this mess. Not the free market. If anything, GWB is culpable for *not* bringing this issue to the public sooner while in office.

Re:Who is the bloodsucker?

[tbannist]

Except when you actually look at all the facts rather than latching on to one thing and assuming it is the source of all evil, you find out something interesting:

The mortgages backed by that program had a lower than average failure rate. You see, unregulated lending institutions made the majority of the loans that are now going bankrupt, in fact more than 75% of the loans that had gone bad did not involve the companies in the program you cite at all.

Of course, the whole "it's the mortgages" thing is pretty much off track. It was the unregulated trade in "Mortgage backed assets" that caused the problem. That was free market behavior at it's very essence. The banks sold each other worthless bonds because they could find idiots at the other banks willing to buy worthless junk. They paid a rating agency to rate their mortgages as no risk because of the housing bubble, as long as prices on housing skyrocketed even if someone defaulted on the mortgage they could sell the house for more than the mortgage.

Sorry, but the program you cite isn't a culprit in the financial collapse.