Stimulus Package – Pork and Payoffs

A few weeks ago they bailed out the UAW, now the Democrat congress is going to spend over a trillion dollars (including interest)of your money paying off the public employee unions and special interests who funded their 2008 election victories.

A quick look at the Senate Committee on Appropriations press release shows the mind blowing magnitude of pork, waste and payoffs.

The “Education” section is a great example of awful policy. Of the $125,000,000,000 allotted for education and training, only $13,900,000,000 is going to students, in the form of Pell Grants, and a percentage of that will be eaten up by administrative costs.

If we’re going to spend $125 Billion on education, why not use the whole $125 Billion for Pell or Pell type grants? Universities will still get the money and we’ll reap the economic and social rewards of a more educated populace for generations.

Of the $140,000,000,000 slated for “infrastructure” only $30,000,000,000 goes to highways, roads and bridges. The rest goes for things like “green” retrofitting of existing buildings, light rail, paving over parklands, tearing up pavement and planting trees and dam removal. Oh yeah, and there’s that $2,250,000,000 slush fund for local friends of Barak.

Nancy Pelosi thinks all this spending is a good idea “because every dollar in state aid creates $1.38 in economic activity.” She doesn’t mention that the same entity that gave one of her staffers this figure for her to parrot, the Congressional Budget Office, also says each dollar returned to the private sector via lower taxes produces over $3 in economic activity. Which leads us to”¦

The Lyman Stimulus Package

Not being burdened by an education in economics nor afflicted with reverence for the lunatic Keynes, I came up with my own $800,000,000,000 stimulus plan.

Unlike the banking crisis, this is a situation where direct payments to taxpayers would produce the desired results.

Total personal income taxes collected in 2007 were $1,236,259,371,000 ($1.26 trillion). It’s a safe bet this figure will be lower for 2009, but let’s be generous and use the 2007 figure. The $819,000,000,000 ($819 billion) stimulus package is roughly equal to the amount of individual income taxes to be collected for the first eight months of 2009 — January to August.

This means that for the cost of the “stimulus package” you could give every taxpayer an eight month tax holiday, or reduce their taxes by 66% for 2009. Think that would stimulate the economy? Do you think the average of $3500 each taxpayer would have to spend would stimulate the economy? Do you think you would put that $3500 to better and fairer use than congress and the cronies who fund their campaigns?

Correction:

The figure of $3500 per taxpayer is incorrect. I incorrectly divided $819,000,000,000 by the total number of returns filed, not the number of individual and joint returns. The correct share of the stimulus package for each taxpayer is about $5900. All other figures are correct.