STIMULATE ME!

I won't spend a lot of time on this because it is all over the Internet. It's pretty clear the stimulus package is no such thing. It is really a pork laden liberal wish list.

Here are a couple Items listed by Congressman Forbes from VA.

50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, which recently spent $95,000 for the American Ballet Theatre in New York City; $300,000 to restore an outdoor sculpture collection in Miami, Florida; and $190,000 for various artistic endeavors in San Francisco, CA; $335 million for STD Education and Prevention, such as the CDC's transgender beauty pageant to advertised HIV testing, and an STD awareness event that taught participants how "to flirt with greater finesse;" $600 million to buy new cars for government workers, on top of the $3.5 billion already spent each year on government passenger cars; $150 million for repairs to the Smithsonian Institution, which recently spent $31,000 for designer upholstery, and $4,000 for a heater for the lap pool of their most recent Director.

Thats just from one website. We could go on for days showing waste.

So here is my take on saving the economy. The first bailout program was a panic attack that flushed a bunch money down the toilet. Yes it stopped some large financial institutions from failing but it did not loosen credit and those financial institutions have not changed their ways. A better solution would have been to buy the bad debt at a steep discount and we could have recovered some of the money we shelled out and have made more credit available. However we should have also demanded large cuts in operating expenses if tax dollars where going to be used to buy a "banks" bad debt.

This would have restored some discipline to the financial markets and we would have emerged from the crisis in better shape.

Now we are going to give more money away and this will not do what it is supposed to do either.

All this government spending is not going to stimulate the economy out of this recession. It did not work in the 1930's it will not work now. It is however going to hurt us in the long run. Some strategic spending in reasonable amounts might have been a good idea. Such as on transportation infrastructure BUT only with cuts is non essential areas. The Republicans failed to properly respond to the economic crisis and now the Democrats are making it worse.

The picture above is more stimulating then anything the Government has done so far and I don't know about you but I could use some stimulus to get my mind off the economy.