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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.
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 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.
> 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.
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...
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!)
With the world's financial system in the brink of collapse from deregulation, isn't it about time to dump the bullshit right-wing ideology behind that deregulation ?
"the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."
...
Sorry, it didn't quote work that way.
The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.
''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''
Not that I blame the right any less, but this whole idea that not regulating is a "right-wing" ideology is ridiculous. Both sides want to look the other way when they are getting their short-term gains. Both sides then want to blame the other when the shit hits the fan. I agree there was a regulation failure. I do not agree it was a right-wing ideology that caused it.
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?