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$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.
Frankly, the telco's were given million of dollars to expand broadband years ago and essentially pissed the money away. As for education spending, I've always said it should be cut and prioritized. The idea that money allocated to education actually goes to educate kids is a sick joke in this country. Higher education? Many universities sit on huge sums of money and still get government help so I'm not losing sleep over that one either. This is supposed to be a stimulus bill but it's been nothing but an attempt to get all the candy out of the bag and eat it at once. With less than 20% of any of it slated to go into effect in the first year the Obama "pass it or else" mantra is exposed as rhetoric.
"Bipartisanship" isn't useful in this context, because one party is working from macroeconomic theory and reason, and the other party is working from the ideological mantra of "Spending Bad. Tax Cuts Good." To the Congressional Republicans, things like school construction won't result in jobs for construction workers: apparently magic pixies will simply drop the new schools out of the sky in exchange for our money.
President Obama needs to realize that it's the U.S. Congress, not the Snuggle-Senate, and beat some heads together to get good policy through. The $800b he proposed was too small to begin with, and all of these cuts make it more likely that we're not going to have enough stimulus to do anything useful.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
They need to be able to blame somebody when this supposed "stimulus" fails miserably. And I'm hesitant to call it a stimulus because more than 80% of the cash will be sitting in bank accounts untouched for at least a year, obviously not doing much stimulating.
I am sure they would love to ignore the Republicans... Unlike the House rules, however, the senate requires 60 votes to get anything substantial done. Meaning, they have something called filibuster rules that allow individual senators to slow/stop bills in its tracks...
Meaning, the democrats are not trying to be nice and work with the republicans... They are forced to deal with at least 3 Republicans to get the stimulus bill moving forward and they know this... Hence, the reason for the compromise..
Cutting higher ed and broadband gives the Republicans what they want: Keep the sheep stupid and uncommunicative.
So, will Monday night's speech ditch the theme of "bipartisanship"? Isn't getting him any votes anyway.
The perhaps most effective thing in the packet in long term would have been building faster and better broadband connections. It enables people to search for work more effectively, communicate and network better, work remotely, and self study.
Not that I care, I live outside US and have still some 2 terabytes of bandwidth to use this month :)
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It's lots of fun to criticize those nasty Republicans for blocking this bill. We can all call them names and blame them entirely for the mess and feel really good about ourselves in the process. But I approach this from a different perspective. As one of the ever-shrinking group of people who pay the freight for these wonderful government programs I thought I would share a few numbers with this forum. When we talk about $800B, how much is that really? Well, take a gander at the following statistics:
- there are 138 million taxpayers in the US
- the top 10% of earners pay 71% of the taxes
- the income cutoff for the top 10% is $109K
So, doing some simple math I compute that those top 10% (roughly 14 million taxpayers) are responsible for $800,000,000,000 times 0.71, or about $40,000 each. Think about that. Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes. Also remember that many people file jointly, so that $109,000 is really more like a married couple, both of whom work, each making $54,000. Now how many slashdot posters are we talking about here? I would wager there are quite a large number of posters on this board in that top 10%. How many of you have $40,000 laying around that you are willing to give to the government to build schools in another state, or to give broadband to people in the boonies, or the myriad other "critical programs" that need your hard-earned money?
The numbers in this post are for the 2006 tax year and were obtained from http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
No.
This is about creating jobs. Quickly. While it would be great if you could take unemployed factory workers and have them run fiber to everyone's house, it isn't very realistic. To 'break ground' quickly on this project would require the money going to people who already know how to and have the skills necessary to build this. Realistically, that is only the cableco/telco/and really big ispco that isn't a cableco or telco.
My congressman was not going to stand up in front of the world and ask for money that was going to be handed over to those companies.
It doesn;t mean there won't be a separate bill, it just means it won't be in the stimulus porkfest.
How come Cleveland has more spending on its public schools than most other G8 nations, but they are all shitholes. Maybe the students are stupid and unwilling to learn? Maybe they come from a culture that denegrates education before it even starts? I mean, how come Democrats always talk about more money for schools and for public institution but at the same time, continue to spend billions on an arts and media that does nothing but continually denegrate culture, learning, and refinement? I mean, people are only doing what you tell them, and you are telling them to do stupid stuff.
This is my sig.
And while we are at it, lets dump Brown vs. Board of Education too while we are at it, eh? After all, if a state wants to start segregating schools you can just move to another state, right? Or if the state wants all their public schools to teach intelligent design, you should either hold your nose or move--under no circumstance should you appeal to those pesky activist judges in the the federal courts, right?
Want to improve education? Operate at the neighborhood level. The community can figure out the best way to educate their kids. But the devil is in the details and here in America, we value providing a fair chance to anybody regardless of socio-economic status. That means the federal government has an obligation to make sure a child in one state has as good of an education as in another. That means that regardless of what crazy sounding idea the neighborhood comes up with, a student there should graduate with the same knowledge as from some other place. One of the easiest roles the federal government can play in ensuring equity is leveling the playing field so all school districts get the same funding.
PS: good luck with killing the teachers union--you wouldn't win an election on that platform.
And corporal punishment? Seriously? I've been trolled, haven't I :-)
When you give someone a tax break, you become less of a bloodsucker, than you were before, when you were taxing them higher... Or did you call telcos "bloodsuckers" over something else?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Only time and debt destruction can fix it...
Exactly. That's why when I read the headline my first thought was GOOD.
Fixing this problem by taking on more debt is like helping a trauma victim by stabbing him.
As nice as it would be to have the IT sector get a big slice of pork, it's just not in the national interest. And that's how we have to think for the next few years. "What's good for me" will have to take a back seat sometimes to "what's good for the country."
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It's actually quite easy to spend $800b, just don't let the government do it. If you must "stimulate", just send a check to the people that you are taking the money from in the first place. That would be almost $3000 apiece for every man, woman and child in the USA.
The reason for these cuts is that the Republicans have an ideological predisposition to cut taxes, period. These cuts serve primarily to increase the proportion of tax custs in the bill, despite the fact that tax custs do not stimulate the economy as well as direct spending would, because tax cuts mostly benefit people who are in a position to save money.
Why is the stimulus necessary? Because the Congressional Budget Office says that supply of goods and services is going to contract by $2 tn, or 14% of GDP. What the "less government through less taxes" movement is doing is making the already undersized stimulus less effective, significantly increasing the risk of a downward economic spiral. That's my job and your job they're going to take.
Do you even know what stimulus is?
650 Million for converter boxes?
Which will go to companies who make them and their workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
350 Million to buy back watershed lands?
Which will go into the pockets of people who have watershed land, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
1 Billion to the census dept for ???
Which will go to census workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
All those things are exactly the entire damn point of the bill. There are things in there that are not, and won't help stimulate anything, but you're apparently so ignorant you don't know the point of the stimulus bill, which is to spend money on crap so that the money enters the economy.
Republicans, OTOH, want to put it in the economy via 'tax cuts', which, ignoring the fact those are skewed towards those making more money, shows they at least get the concept of 'stimulus' somewhat better than you.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I agree with you 100%. Which is why pretty much the only thing the feds can legislate is bills that level the financial playing field. The *can* however, say words that have no legal impact. Words like "read to your children instead of park them in front of the TV".
This sounds good on the surface, but I'm not sure it is "correct" and you'd have to tack on things that would make some uncomfortable. I'm thinking things like sex-ed, contraceptives, abortion, adoption... that kind of thing. People are gonna do the nasty no matter what it does to their tax status--you best provide people options to both prevent pregnancy and help them out in case they do get pregnant. There is probably a reason nobody proposes what you say, even if it might a workable solution. It would be a mess politically--but I think if somebody was bold enough we could pull something off--it wouldn't be exactly what you want though.
Better yet, make hours spend doing volunteer work with non-profits (and schools) something you can deduct the same way as other charitable donations. As always though... how do you value the hourly wage? I can see a million ways to exploit either of our plans if not careful.
Something people, and especially the politicians, seem to be forgetting is that this is a stimulus bill to get the economy going again.
Anything that doesn't support the goal of fixing the economy doesn't belong in this bill, no matter how much we think that particular chunk of funding is needed.
You missed a crucially important point: Tax cuts have an immediate impact on the economy. Stimulus takes months or years to propagate into an economy.
Here is the problem. Most of this stuff is pork that should be spent and debated on their own merits. In the Stimulus package, it was originally passed off as an emergency bill with no debate. When the Republicans grew a pair, it forces the debate but the so called necessity of spending doesn't offer a proper debate.
Think of this like the bailout bill, there was such a rush to put it out that key politicians including Obama said it doesn't need to be perfect, we can change things later, then we find out that the bail out paid for parties at large resorts and so on. All of the stuff cut from this bill are things that will need more of a debate then what is currently availible to the politicians. So while they are cut from this bill which was basically a spending and appropriations bill before, they aren't off the table, it's just an affirmation to push them to the proper time, place, and environment to consider them. There are no short term job creation or direct financial benefit with them to the public in the near term so they don't need to be included into a stimulus bill by necessity which would bypass the traditional debate surrounding them.
In short, when they drafted the original bill, they went past stimulus and started piling in wish list items, some of which have been rejected for quite some time, some of which might be good for the country but has no direct effect on the goals of the stimulus goal, but most of all deserve to be properly considered in normal debate. Sneaking them into this bill was only an attempt to remove the debate on them, cutting them out doesn't mean they are gone, it just means they will have to go throught normal channels.
650 Million for converter boxes?
Which will go to companies who make them and their workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
You do know that no converter box is made by a US company? This will do wonders for all those Chinese folks, except they are probably made in a mostly-automated factory with 20 employees. It might do some good for Walmart and Best Buy selling them, but not all that much.
We gave up on consumer electronics a long, long time ago. I think the last TV plant in the US closed in the 1980s sometime. And I believe it was in Chicago. All the familiar brands (RCA, Zenith, etc.) are now owned by companies in China and Korea.
Or maybe they just don't see this working out any better than the first $200 billion.
When a government job is created, it is not stimulative. It is a transfer from taxpayers to another taxpayer, and since government activity is never 100% efficient, there are significant losses. A direct transfer payment (without government meddling) would AT LEAST be 100% efficient.
Not that it makes the plan a good idea. In order for any "stimulus" to work, it must generate more jobs or economic activity than it costs. There is very, very little in this package that does this.
I know of two schools locally where imminent construction has been put on hold due to loss of state funding. I'd say these qualify as 'shovel ready' and certainly would provide stimulus and necessary infrastructure.
After 8 years of "no time to discuss" in order to pass anti-american legislation, I find your argument that we must stop and discuss anything which might be 'debatable" laughable. Everything is debatable to someone, especially those with a self-serving agenda.
"You have liberated me from thought."