Oh, the Economy

It was a dire emergency, the stimulus bill had to be approved without even taking the time to read it (and lobbyists got to see it before the minority party did) or the entire economy would COLLAPSE!!!

Except..... the government hasn't even spent 6 percent of it yet.

It turns out the federal government is not even efficient at wasting our money. The New York Times reports that less than 6 percent of the $787 billion stimulus package approved by Congress in February has been spent so far. The Obama administration has said it wants to spend 70 percent by the summer of 2010, so it will have to pick up the pace. Not to worry, says Vice President Biden:

I think that what you're going to see happen here is the velocity of this will increase not just arithmetically, but geometrically here. At least, we've got to make that happen.

They'd better hurry, before the economy recovers on its own. Both Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Christina Romer, chairwoman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, say it looks like the recession will end later this year. (Barclays Capital strategist Barry Knapp says it may have ended last month, which he predicts is where the National Bureau of Economic Research ultimately will locate the bottom of the downturn.) Yet the Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 25 percent of the stimulus money will be spent by the end of the year. That's one-quarter of a sum that stimulus enthusiasts such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said was woefully inadequate.

We've been had. We've been snookered, beaten, robbed, and left for dead and the politicians are rifling our bodies for loose change.

And we're going to let these same people take control of our health care? What do we care, I guess. We're dead, anyway.

At least somebody's benefiting:

'WE spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama -- $60.7 million to be exact -- and we're proud of it," boasted Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, to the Las Vegas Sun this week. The behemoth labor organization's leadership is getting its money's worth.

Happily, we have this handy dandy chart comparing where Obama's economists said we'd be without the stimulus and where we are with it. Is it upside down?

Pin It

Pin It