Tag Archives: Spending

Democrat Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says we may need another massive stimulus

Budget Deficit
Budget Deficit

The first two spending bills didn’t work, so we just need to keep trying harder to spend our way out of debt!

Check out this story from Reuters. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

U.S. leaders should be open to the possibility of a second stimulus package to jolt the economy out of a recession still causing job losses, House of Representatives Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said on Tuesday.

…President Barack Obama led the charge for a two-year $787 billion stimulus package that his fellow Democrats who control Congress pushed through the House and Senate in February and he has argued it would help create or save up to 4 million jobs.

Create 4 million jobs? He’s lost 2.5 million jobs so far. Maybe he doesn’t know what the word create means?

foundry_recovery_plan_full

Michelle Malkin lists a few more of the Democrats in favor of more government spending.

Excerpt:

As you all have heard, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, the Clinton economic adviser now on Team Obama, has floated a second stimulus plan. Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has echoed the call. Other Democrats are open to it.

Only 10 percent of Porkulus One has been spent, misspent, or gone untracked, but who’s counting?

I’ve uploaded two documents for your perusal this morning: The first is a GAO report on stimulus spending by states and localities, which will be released this morning at a House oversight hearing.

You can read the whole thing here.

Bottom line: The funds are not being spent on what they’re supposed to be spent on. States made up their own criteria for spending. School and transportation bureaucrats preserved their own jobs instead of “stimulating” others.

The second document is a GOP memo dissecting the failures of Porkulus One.

You can read the whole thing here
.

Michelle lists a few of the key findings from the second document.

National Debt
National Debt

Why didn’t the massive Democrat spending spree work?

This is lesson one of Economics 101. When government spends money, the money comes out of the private sector. Government is not even close to allocating capital and producing wealth as efficiently as the free market system.

Ed Morrissey explains:

Here’s where we get into the “saved or created” dodge of the Obama administration.  The Porkulus money may have “saved” jobs, but they were government jobs, not the private sector.  Most government employees have union representation, primarily by the SEIU.  The only jobs Porkulus may have saved were those of bureaucrats in state government, and mostly to make sure the unions stay on the side of the Democrats.

None of that money went into promoting growth in the private sector, which is why unemployment skyrocketed.  Capital stayed out of the market, in part because of fears of confiscatory tax increases and in part because of the amount of regulation threatened by the Obama administration, and what capital was left will get eaten up by the cost of Porkulus eventually.  And the GAO says it will take months just to get effective reporting on how that money gets spent, regardless of where it goes.

Obama’s support is now virtually 50-50 according to Rasmussen Reports.But he won’t care, because he’s the Obamessiah! As long as the left-wing fascists and terrorists love him, who cares what economically-literate peons like us think?

Are teacher unions interested in helping your children to succeed in life?

This is a great article from the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Club for Growth)

Excerpt:

In her weekly “What Matters Most” newspaper column, Randi Weingarten recently bid the Big Apple farewell. Ms. Weingarten has been elevated to president of the national American Federation of Teachers from head of its New York City affiliate, and she had some notable parting words: “One of the most rewarding (and exhausting) things about working in public education in New York City is that it is the best laboratory in the world for trying new things.”

Well, it could be, if it weren’t for Ms. Weingarten’s union. Since taking over in 1998, she has done everything she could to block significant reforms to New York’s public schools. Take her opposition to charter schools. She resisted raising the state cap on charters from 100 unless the union could organize them. (She lost and the cap now is 200.)

Ms. Weingarten was also against merit pay for individual teachers. She supported a law that bars school districts from linking teacher tenure to student test scores. In return for even the mildest pension reforms, Ms. Weingarten recently won a concession that teachers no longer need to work on the two days before the start of the school year. Meanwhile, she has fought to ensure that the Absent Teacher Reserve Pool keeps allowing teachers whom no principal wants to hire to receive their full salaries. New York spends an estimated $150 million on this and on Teacher Reassignment Centers (for instructors who have been accused of misconduct) alone.

Speaking of money, Ms. Weingarten has long been among the union leaders claiming that more cash will fix public education. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has paid for the modest reforms he’s been able to implement by increasing spending to $22 billion from $13 billion, much of that in teacher salaries. The four-year high school graduation rate in New York City is now 56%. In union politics, results like these are how you win a promotion to national leadership.

I blogged before about the NYC teachers removed from their duties who are still being paid.

But there’s more to it than that. My Christian readers should also be aware that teacher’s unions, like most unions (but not all!), are also very interested in promoting left-wing, anti-family social programs. (Weingarten herself is openly gay)

If you missed my post about Obama’s appointment of a gay activist to be the director of “safe schools”, check it out here.

The take-home lesson for you is not to vote for Democrats just because they say they will spend more money on education. What Democrats really mean is that they will spend more money on teacher’s unions, so that the teachers can turn around and advocate for leftist policies, like abortion and same-sex marriage, using union dues.

John Boehner asks: where are the jobs?

This is a pretty good ad featuring House Republican Leader John Boehner. The ad argues that government spending is not creating any jobs.

H/T Nice Deb.