Quote Originally Posted by Lyle View Post
$1 billion for Amtrak, which hasn’t earned a profit in four decades.

$2 billion to help subsidize child care.

$400 million for research into global warming.

$2.4 billion for projects to demonstrate how carbon greenhouse gas can be safely removed from the atmosphere.

$650 million for coupons to help consumers convert their TV sets from analog to digital, part of the digital TV conversion.

$600 million to buy a new fleet of cars for federal employees and government departments.

$75 million to fund programs to help people quit smoking.

$21 million to re-sod the National Mall, which suffered heavy use during the Inauguration.

$2.25 billion for national parks. This item has sparked calls for an investigation, because the chief lobbyist of the National Parks Association is the son of Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wisc. The $2,25 billion is about equal to the National Park Service’s entire annual budget. The Washington Times reports it is a threefold increase over what was originally proposed for parks in the stimulus bill. Obey is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

$335 million for treatment and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.

$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. $4.19 billion to stave off foreclosures via the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. The bill allows nonprofits to compete with cities and states for $3.44 billion of the money, which means a substantial amount of it will be captured by ACORN, the controversial activist group currently under federal investigation for vote fraud. Another $750 million would be exclusively reserved for nonprofits such as ACORN – meaning cities and states are barred from receiving that money. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., charges the money could appear to be a “payoff” for the partisan political activities community groups in the last election cycle.

$44 million to renovate the headquarters building of the Agriculture Department.

$32 billion for a “smart electricity grid to minimize waste.

$87 billion of Medicaid funds, to aid states.

$53.4 billion for science facilities, high speed Internet, and miscellaneous energy and environmental programs.

$13 billion to repair and weatherize public housing, help the homeless, repair foreclosed homes.

$20 billion for quicker depreciation and write-offs for equipment.

$10.3 billion for tax credits to help families defray the cost of college tuition.

$20 billion over five years for an expanded food stamp program.

.....I don't think they can just throw money at the problem and expect it to go away especially when this bill doesn't come close to touching the toxic assets the banks still hold.
All these things create jobs. They put money into people's pockets, who then spend the money on goods and services. The people who supply the goods and services then spend/invest the money and it continues on. The good old Keynesian "multiplier". We 're back to using keynesian economics because monetary policy, the preferred government method of stimulating/slowing the economy of the past thirty years, no longer works anymore due to the collapse of the financial system. It'd be great if we could just fuck around with the interest rate (monetary policy) and fix this but due to the system being so fucked that even zero interest rates (currently) are having zero effect the only policy option left to stimulate the economy is for the government to spend money. Which they're doing.

Take food stamps. Food stamps actually supply the biggest bang for a buck that you can buy with your stimulus dollars, because they're spent immediately by the recipient, pumping the money straight into the economy. Here's a table that shows the most effective ways of spending stimulus money :




So you can see almost all of the things on your list have a positive effect after they're initially spent, apart from all the things the GOP are trying to force onto the stimulus bill like various types of tax cuts.


What Obama is doing wrong however is the bank bailout thing. He's just extending and massively increasing the corporate socialist Bush response to the current crisis. It looks like he's as bought and paid for by Wall Street as Bush was. I'll have more to say about the bailout side of things (which will total trillions eventually, far in excess of the piddling $850 billion stimulus bill) when they announce it officially.

So in a nutshell : the stimulus bill is a separate thing from the bank bailout programs. It's being spent to arrest the plunge of the American economy into deflation and depression, which is where it's headed if no stimulus happens. These things may still happen but the stimulus bill is an attempt to prevent them.