Stimulating Thoughts: CBO Warns Dem Bill would damage economy

Plus: Someone ask Pelosi what the U.S. population is. Krauthammer and more....

The Senate is poised on Tuesday to pass the most monstrous hogzilla spending bill of all time despite overwhelming public disapproval of the bill in it's current form The latest Rasmussen Reports show 62% of respondents feel that the bill should include more tax cuts and less spending.

Unverified reports describe calls to Senate and House offices running 100 to 1 against the bill yet Obama and his House and Senate colleagues soldier on to ram this monster down the throats of the American people.

Reports like this don't seem to bother them at all:

CBO: Obama stimulus harmful over long haul
Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
February 4, 2009

President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

CBO estimates that by 2019 the Senate legislation would reduce GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent on net. [The House bill] would have similar long-run effects, CBO said in a letter to Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, who was tapped by Mr. Obama on Tuesday to be Commerce Secretary.

But never mind, Dems have decided that the CBO, which serves the Congress which they control, is no longer the ultimate authority it was when it released information critical of President Bush's spending plans.

Just How Dumb is Nancy Pelosi?

Is it any wonder that Dems want to "fix" the upcoming 2010 Census to get a better count of Americans (but most especially those who vote Democrat)?



"Every month we don't have an economic recovery package 500 million Americans lose their jobs."

Did 200 million illegals slip under the border since Inauguration day or does Speaker dim bulb just like really big numbers?

President Hope and Change Becoming Prez. Fear and Catastrophe?

It isn't just Nancy Pelosi out there using the most virulent scaremongering rhetoric. Obama's done more than his share:

So Much For Hope Over Fear
By Charles Krauthammer
February 06, 2009

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

WASHINGTON -- Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.
...
And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
...
It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress' own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports The Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

It's amazing how quickly talk of hope and change have been replaced by fear and partisan political sniping of the kind George W. Bush would never have approved.

But perhaps Obama feels it is easier to attack and dismiss his GOP critics rather than accept their good ideas and have to listen to the shrill voice of Nancy "500 million Americans" Pelosi whose disgust for any bipartisan cooperation has been made quite clear (here and here)

Obama may also be counting on the economy to recover anyway, as recessions typically do, just in time for the 2010 election. But if that doesn't happen, Republicans will be in the cat bird seat by reminding voters that they raised their voice in unison against this abomination.