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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.
The Republicans are just as clueless as the Democrats in the current situation. The reason is because, just like the Great Depression, there really are no answers to deal with the current economic downturn. Only time and debt destruction can fix it...
In short.. They can spend $2T if they like, and it will do little to nothing to stop the current problems from advancing. When you are a nation that is 70% consumption and have a 400% GDP debt ratio, there is little you can do to 'simulate" the underlying fundamentals. Meaning, the problem was overstimulation to begin with..
Republicans are in fact the only ones holding this pork-laden monstrosity at bay.
I wouldn't bother with a bill in the first place--I don't see stimulating the economy listed as a federal government responsibility in the Constitution--but if you're going to do this at least be honest about it.
With something like 60% of spending happening in 2010 and 2011 they are "stimulative", they're pork-barrel spending. The boy President thinks that any spending counts as stimulus--the only thing this bill will stimulate is more government and more debt.
Some version of this mess will eventually pass, but hopefully we'll strip some of the pork out of it. One thing's for sure--this is not "change we can believe in".
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
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.
Strange though it may sound, it is actually quite a difficult thing to spend $800b. When a stimulus package like this goes into effect, while the budget may be quickly allocated to specific projects, the actual draw down can only occur through vouched expenditure, and this can only occur as work is done. With this in mind, actually spending $160b (20%) is still quite an achievement.
However, the fact that the projects are started and have a guaranteed completion should provide more stimulus than the actual cash spend.
I don't know whether the spending is going to the right places, or that it will have the desired stimulus effect, but it's not correct to suggest that this is some kind of ruse just because it appears that the funding is not front-loaded.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I don't see stimulating the economy listed as a federal government responsibility in the Constitution
"Promote the general welfare"
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
Our schools are foundering. Our internet is slower than any other developed nation. Yet Republicans forced spending on both of those VERY NEEDY PROGRAMS to be cut from this bill.
Our schools are not foundering due to a lack of funding. They are foundering because a powerful public education cartel has driven school spending skyward, making the United States among the world's biggest education spenders, even as student achievement lags.
"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.
Oh my God you are so full of crap. No one is saying that building schools won't employ people. What is being said is, "what happens to those jobs when the schools built?" These are not permanent jobs.
Also, building schools is not what Republicans object to. It's the millions to birth control programs. How does giving out condoms provide jobs? How is money to Amtrak going to produce jobs? Sure, it helps out the people working for Amtrak, but every passenger on Amtrak is NON-passenger on Greyhound or Delta. How does extending unemployment benefits create jobs? How does allocating money so groups like ACORN can purchase houses and rent them out create jobs?
Now these may be great ideas, but they do NOT belong in the "stimulus" package if they do not stimulate. Seriously, how big of a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that?
In other words, don't let the facts cloud your preconceived judgment of "Republicans bad, Democrats good".
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
> 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.
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.
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.
Let's ignore for the moment that this is deficit spending, so no one's taxes will be raised. You still fail at simple math. A couple making 109K would only owe 40K in taxes if EVERYONE in the top 10% earned EXACTLY 40K, which is patently false. Many people earn more, and would thus shoulder more of the cost. Let me use your own numbers to prove you wrong.
- there are 138 million taxpayers in the US
- 5% of the population earns between 109K and 154K.
- This 5% pays 11% of the taxes.
So AT MOST, your couple would owe 13K, and to get a number that high, I'm still making the false assumption that everyone in that bracket earns the base of 109K (not because it's plausible, but because your link doesn't give a better breakdown). That's a far cry from your 40K.
I came here for a good argument
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.
They are also foundering because:
- We are having to pay OUR tax money to educate the kids of people who illegally entered the country and mooch off all our social services, demanding handouts even as they thumb their noses at our laws.
- Our classes are forced to move at the pace of the slowest fucking idiot, rather than stratifying classes into advanced and non-advanced, moving the smarter kids up to give them greater challenges and keep them from getting bored.
- Thanks to years of parent lawsuits, the very idea of holding a kid back a year because they haven't learned what they needed to learn has gone away. These stupid fucking parents insist "waah but it'll hurt his self-esteem don't you dare cut my kid off from his friends" - I see them every day and want to grab them, shake them, and yell your kid is a fucking moron! He is harming the education of the other kids around him! But nooooo... instead, we socially promote them, so the entire 8th grade class is still trying to read at a 4th grade level. Meanwhile, the smart kids are bored out of their fucking skulls. I've watched a friend's kid actually get sent home with "warnings" from the teacher. What was the kid doing? She was performing like a 4th grader in the 1st grade class. She picked up cursive writing watching her parents. She finished the "math homework" while the teacher was blabbing on trying to teach the rest of the kids how to multiply 2x2, and then got out a copy of The Mysterious Island I'd given as a christmas present and started reading.
US public schools are not foundering because we don't spend enough money. They are foundering because teachers' unions make it impossible to get rid of bad teachers, because school districts do not stratify and have allowed social promotion of retards to become the norm, and because they punish the exemplary kids rather than nurturing their intelligence and love of learning.
And most of this has shit-all to do with monetary spending, too, save for the fact that when the kids of illegals are found in public schools, the administration should be required to report it under penalty of jail time, and INS/ICE should use that as a great opportunity to track down the parents and deport the whole lot.
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
A debt crisis is just a generic way to saying that a nations (or world) wealthy class needs to realize their losses... Protecting a nations wealthy, which is what we are currently doing, is not smart and will not work long term because it will ultimately create social unrest. Personally, I would prefer option 3.
3. Realize that an economic collapse is inevitable, be a real leader, and prepare the public for it. Next, seize all major insolvent banks and wipe out bond and shareholders. Also, provide "fast track' legislation for corporate and personal bankruptcies. Next, expand social welfare services during the crisis to make sure that no one starves or is made unnecessarily homeless. Next, provide government sponsored services for newly formed businesses, and individuals fresh out of bankruptcy to help them get back on their feet. Meaning, once the mal-investment debt is destroyed, provide stimulus at a point where it actually has the chance of being used as a real investment.
And finally... Eliminate the fractional reserve banking model forever. It ultimate is the reason for boom and bust cycles, and in the global marketplace its time has come and gone...
The problem is all too often we mistakely expect (and often demand) equal results regardless of "socio-economic status". Sadly, that's just not possible. Here's an example -- Kids do better in two parent households. Statistically, they end up making more money (read bringing in tax dollars) than those from single parent homes. Want to get equal results? Stop rewarding bad behavior with money. Single parent unemployeed or on welfare? Have another kid and you get no extra money. Offer tax incentives to married/domestic partners. Offer tax rebates for volenteer hours spent at your own child's public school.
Two parent households and involved parents. That will buy you more per dollar spent than tossing money at the "problem". Lets focus on that, why don't we?
Strange though it may sound, it is actually quite a difficult thing to spend $800b.
Then why try to spend it all at once? The senate was right to cut down the bill (largely at the insistance of the Republicans although even some "blue dog" democrats grumbled about Pelosi's bill). Trying to rush anything throught Congress virtually guarantees that it will become a christmass tree so overloaded with pork and favored special interest spending that it could easily cost several times more than to pass the measures separately. This is especially true with non immediate spending. They should pass the critical spending first and then work on the other things as time permits and circumstances become more amenable. IMHO, the democrats made too big a deal of their "first 100 days" pledges as if rushing things, regardless of circumstances, was obviously the best way to go about completing the job.
With this in mind, actually spending $160b (20%) is still quite an achievement.
In a macabre sort of way I suppose that is true. However, as a Libertarian I am still horrified at the massive government spending that is currently taking place to make good the ill effects of previous government interventions, which notably include flooding the market with liquidity and allowing the money supply to increase massively in the years following 9/11 in an ill fated attempt to "smooth out" some bumps in the economic road and look where that got us. Now the government wants to cure what is essentially a spending problem, with...wait for it...even more government and consumer spending? Do we cure an alcoholic by offering him even more of his favorite beverage? Certainly not, so how can we cure a spending problem with more spending and making even MORE money available to spend?
However, the fact that the projects are started and have a guaranteed completion should provide more stimulus than the actual cash spend.
I don't know how it is in your state, but here in California it takes CalTrans and state contractors forever to finish highway projects. In some cases it has taken as long as two (2) DECADES after the first load of dirt was scooped to complete what should have been two (2) year or less construction projects. I remain skeptical that more of these types of projects will provide a lot of stimulus to the economy. After all, trucks cannot use new on-ramps and overpasses to move goods until they are actually completed.
I don't know whether the spending is going to the right places, or that it will have the desired stimulus effect
Don't worry, its NOT going to the right places AND it will NOT have the desired stimulus effect.
but it's not correct to suggest that this is some kind of ruse just because it appears that the funding is not front-loaded.
At best, it is an unwelcome distraction to the real problem which is the bad mortgage backed debts that are like sand in the proverbial economic engine, corrupting everything they touch and poisoning by proxy the balance sheets of everyone even remotely connected. The really important question, IMHO, that isn't being asked is this:
How can Amercians, whose real wages have stagnated since the end of the 1970s compared to economic growth and inflation, continue to pay inflated prices for the nation's housing stock? Most americans and particularly young Americans can really only afford a home that costs less than about $150,000 dollars or so and yet in many parts of the nation the price stubbornly refuses to fall below that level. There are too many dollars in the system relative to what average Americans actually produce and earn and until that problem is addressed I think that this economic malaise will continue, even after the "recovery", until this nation addresses its debt and spending problems.
Housing is at the root of this crises, but beyond even that is
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!)
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.
Businesses never pay taxes. YOU DO.
Businesses necessarily must make up for less profit by sticking it to their customers (in the form of higher prices or less choice), their employees (less wages, fewer benefits, and fewer jobs), their shareholders (less earnings per share, less dividends).
When you tax businesses, you're just indirectly taxing everyone else related to that business, including YOU. Business taxes appeal to the ignorant, because it makes it seem like someone else is paying, when in reality, it's YOU.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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.
Can that private school kick out the non-performing kids or the ones with poor discipline? I know a lot of teachers and after talking to them I've concluded that the single biggest problem in public education today is discipline (more like the lack of), and their options to deal with it.
My aunt works as a teacher in a private school making less money than a public school but she loves it. Every parent comes to parent-teacher meetings. She has next to zero classroom discipline issues because if the kid continues to be a problem he'll get booted out. The parents know this so they make sure it's not a problem.
The problem in public school is what do you do with the kids who just don't care and have parents who don't care. You can't really kick them out of school, but you don't want them in the classroom slowing down the other students. What do you do?
Obama is not your saviour. He is a politician, and the USA is driven by lobbyists whom the best of are backed by the richest corporations.
Want too see how bad things really are for the USA.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca2_1234032281 Wait till about 2:20 in.
46137
The problem is this: Just as we would still have Americans reading by candlelight and shitting in outhouses if it wasn't for the rural water and electrification acts of the 1930's so too will we have a whole damned lot of Americans unable to get ANY usable Internet without a broadband act. Why? Because the big telecos have already run to the places where they can make massive profit and simply aren't interested in running anywhere else. Let me give an example from my own life.
When my parents built their house the cable and ISDN stopped approximately 2 blocks from their house. You can actually see the cable and DSL junction boxes from their front porch. That was 29 years ago. Do you know how far away it is now? That's right! 2 blocks away. Even though there are now a good 3 dozen houses on that little 5 mile road, all of which would have been happy to buy the full bundle package for 5 years. How do I know that? Because about 7 years ago I got all the neighbors together and we sat down and talked. It turned out there was a couple of small business owners living there that would love to telecommute into the office, and I had just gotten a large check. So we got together and offered the cableco 15k simply to run the cable. We even offered to get together as a group and sign 5 year agreements for the full bundle package. By our estimate they would make over a quarter million over the life of the agreement and the only out of pocket costs would have been the labor, since at the time that 15k would have paid for the line.
So now they can telecommute and I can just access my families PCs by remote when they need fixes, right? WRONG! To wire up the lousy 4.5 miles they wanted 75k ABOVE whatever the costs of the line PLUS labor were. And from talking to folks around the state and throughout the south I have found a disturbing pattern (at least for me) in the way the telecos behave. Everyone I have talked to says the same thing, that the telecos and cablecos haven't run anything in over a decade, or in our case, in 3 decades. That the little ISPs got bought out by the big guys and that is when any upgrades and rollouts stopped dead. Meanwhile while our lines get slower and shittier by the year our rates are climbing and the FAP (what y'all call a cap) keeps getting worse because they have us by the short hairs. In my area the cable is now $156 for basic/phone/lowest Internet with a FAP of a lousy 36GB. From my neighbors I have learned that the DSL is the same but have worse speed and a even shittier 25GB FAP. Oh, and anyone who uses Linux or OSX gets screwed since all Windows updates don't count against the FAP but all of y'alls do. Nice huh?
THIS is why we need the broadband bill. There is a GOOD reason why we break up monopolies: It is because it doesn't take a monopoly long before its ONLY job is to kill any competition and keep its iron grip on the market. Well then WISPs and the free market will save us right? WRONG. We got a shitty WISP a few years back and I hear they will be out of business by this fall. Why? Because the teleco has been squeezing the living hell out of them for access to the backbone and they simply can't afford the 10 years worth of lawyers fees to fight back. Because monopolies have deep pockets and can SLAPP you into next week. If WE the people run the lines then WE own them. We can then lease them out to multiple vendors and finally have competition so that prices will go down and quality/speeds will go up. The free market only works if there is competition but the buying frenzy that the big telecos and cablecos were allowed to do has ended competition for a great lot of the country.
Believe me in a lot of ways I think the same as you. I am a Barry Goldwater small government type that was run out of the Republican party when the religious nuts took over in the 80's(yes I am old....get off my lawn!) but even I admit there are certain jobs that simply can't be left to the free market. Like bridges, freeways, and yes, broadband. I have seen with my own eyes how broadband has bec
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.