$2 Billion For Broadband Cut From Stimulus Bill 658
pdabbadabba points out a CNN report on changes to the planned economic stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [PDF]) that will remove the $2 billion allocated to broadband development. The changes also eliminated smaller amounts allocated to NASA, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and the National Science Foundation. $16 billion in school construction funding was removed, as well as another $3.5 billion for higher education construction. A variety of environmental projects were also cut or reduced (half of the $7 billion set aside for energy-efficient federal buildings, half of the $600 million for hybrid federal vehicles), and over $8 billion in health-related provisions are gone. The bill will likely go to vote in the Senate on Tuesday.
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I don't know about where you live, but where I do we've already had a mess of wasteful school construction. Cities and towns of modest means have built these "Taj Mahal" schools, sometimes approaching $200 Million.
I don't have a problem with giving construction workers jobs as a stimulus, but let's not be arrogantly wasteful about how we spend the money. It's not JUST about providing short term jobs, it's about putting people to work for the long-term good.
How about fixing our bridges and infrastructure?
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:4, Informative)
I don't see stimulating the economy listed as a federal government responsibility in the Constitution
"Promote the general welfare"
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
I think one of the worst things that republicans have done to this country is to make people feel educated on a subject after ingesting a few sound bites.
Then read this in-depth article on education costs run amok in New Jersey. It's fascinating (and not boring) reading. Unfortunately it will pop your misconcpetions about how well-spent our education dollar is. Maybe after reading this, you can give us a soundbite or two about how spending $500,000 per graduating high school student is good for the taxpayer.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_new_jersey.html [city-journal.org]
Re:Actually (Score:3, Informative)
Except if you bothered to pay attention even the congressional budget office said that the stimulus bill if passed will do more to hurt the economy in the long term over doing nothing.
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/04/cbo-obama-stimulus-harmful-over-long-haul/ [washingtontimes.com]
Wake up Sheeple. You are perfectly willing to sit and listen to what 'Dear Leader' says. You listen to the talking heads regurgitate what better suits the Obama agenda and eat it up like its chocolate ice cream on a hot summer day. Just like the global warming crap. You take Al Gore's word that the sky is falling and we need to all drive Prius and eat vegan or we are going to be extinct by summer. You listen to them say there is a consensus on man made global warming when the truth is the only consensus is that the climate is changing, like it has done for the last 4.5 billion years.
Please, get a clue. Wake up. Take the Red Pill.
DO SOMETHING. Don't blindly follow the Pied Piper to our doom.
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:5, Informative)
> You can ALWAYS count on stimulating an economy of the US's size by reducing taxation.
Yeah, so maybe not. Look up the velocity of money, which has fallen through the floor in the last few months. What that means is that people are essentially stuffing their mattresses, and any additional tax cuts will, in fact, not be stimulative. So you need to directly stimulate - and that means spend.
See this:
http://www.urbandigs.com/2008/12/you_want_to_see_what_deflation.html
Also take a good, long, hard look at deflation and what that means, especially in relation to potential tax cuts. Arguably, we are in a deflationary spiral right now.
Re:no soup! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Do you know who is paying for this? (Score:1, Informative)
If you divide $800 Bln between 137 million taxpayers it's still only $5,800 each.
Where the HELL did you learn to do math.
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:2, Informative)
holy shit. You actually believe that, don't you?
Yes, he does believe it and so do I. We've had 8 years of "tax cuts are how you stimulate the economy" and look where we are. But the Republicans continue to oppose the opposite tack as if it's not worth trying. Our schools are foundering. Our internet is slower than any other developed nation. Yet Republicans forced spending on both of those VERY NEEDY PROGRAMS to be cut from this bill. Both would be the epitome of economic stimulus but Republicans are obstructionists yet again. It's simply true. So yes, we believe it. Funny how that works.
You sound you are quoting an Obama campaign speech, everything bad about the economy now is because of Bush and repulicans, no need to back up that argument, just because it happened during his watch everything he ever pushed for is automatically wrong. Correlation doesn't imply causation and all that, and MOST of his time in office the economy was doing very well.
What the crap does high speed internet have to do with fixing the economy? I'm assume you read an earlier article on slashdot, the reason we don't have high speed everywhere in the US is because ... people don't really want it that bad. Cell towers popped up everywhere because people did want that technology, but high speed internet they could live without. Some people are not interested in pet projects being pushed just because there's a crisis.
How about read the source yourself? (Score:3, Informative)
A letter from the CBO about the stimulus bill [cbo.gov] (PDF)
Instead of relying on someone else's bias to interpret things for you, how about doing some digging and go to the source?
Please tell me where in the linked CBO document it says the stimulus bill will be harmful?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Do you know who is paying for this? (Score:5, Informative)
My god.... you actually believe you're doing this math correctly?
If the top 5% pay that much, that makes up $479.5B. The top 10%, according to you, pay a total of $560B. That means that the second highest 5% would pay ~$80B, which, divided over 7M people is about $11,400, which is in direct contradiction to your earlier assertion that someone making $109K would pay $40,000.
To put it simply, you're full of shit, and don't know even the slightest thing about math.
Spot On ! (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, you have just seized the senator by the balls there.
There are still enough corrupt asshats left in congress to block any and all good ideas to put people back to work. They are still stuck with the idea that tax cuts solve all problems, but are too short sighted to realize that the last 8 years of tax cuts and outsourcing jobs overseas are what got us here in the first place.
I do not hold the republicans solely @ fault here though. The dem side has sought to put plenty of wasteful pork like "Family Planning" crap in their bills as well. I also don't think much of Obama's idea to give 1K to the poor that don't even earn enough to pay taxes @ all. Give them jobs so they earn enough to pay taxes. Give them a shovel and a road to build. What's so hard about that?
All these people just don't get it at all. Everyone in America needs to write their senators and representatives, both republican and democrat, and demand they get with the program and write legislation that will put money into the hands of the working class in the form of jobs and tax cuts. People need to feel warm and fuzzy enough to spend money on new homes and consumer goods. Only that will turn the economy around.
Tax cuts for billionaires won't work, they never have, they never will.Many here don't realize the 2001 (republican) congress with a republican president are the ones that authored all the shady legislation (think derivatives and other stupid ideas) that snowballed into the recent global economic crash.
Re:Who is the bloodsucker? (Score:1, Informative)
Corporations are only taxed on their net gain. Any money put back into the company in the form of building infrastructure (for instance, running cable) does not get taxed. In this way, corporate income taxes have the effect of subsidizing reinvestment.
Re:Great (Score:3, Informative)
There is no better return on investment than money spend educating children. None. You're talking about the future of this country, literally. If there is a problem then you fix the problem, you don't ignore it.
That's not true, frankly. This article [financialtales.com] goes into some detail about why college educations aren't particularly worth it.
The fact of the matter is that the state spends nearly five times more per student than private education costs, yet delivers significantly worse results. The solution doesn't involve continuing to dump more and more resources into a broken system.
Re:Great (Score:1, Informative)
That link's not true, frankly. It assumes best-case gains, ignores inflation, assumes near worst-case college costs, ignores careers where a higher degree is a *requirement*, and ignores the difference in income between degree and non-degree workers. Probably the most common-sense counter to the article is that if you get a degree and the matching higher salary, you still have the option of investing that extra income.
Your own (uncited) numbers on school costs are also wrong, as a quick googling can easily show. National average public school cost per student: $9833 per year. Private school average: $4,700. Presumably those come, for public schools, from dividing the overall budget by the number of students, and for private schools by using the tuition charges. So if you take this at face value, it's 2x, not 5x. (And that's if you trust the private school numbers to be a fair comparison. I personally don't really; there are more religious-run schools than super elite richguy schools, and both those extremes have funding sources outside of tuition charges, which makes getting an accurate count a lot harder.)
And, of course, you don't cite anything on the "worse results" of the public schools. But of course, that would be very hard to fairly do, since the private schools are, well, private; their tuition costs are a natural filter and the public schools aren't really allowed to kick anyone out. (It's similar to comparing one nation's test scores to another's, knowing that one nation only lets its top 40% of students even take the test while ours has nearly *every* student take the test.) Essentially, you'd have to look at a lot of extra statistical information, not just compare two flat averages.
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:3, Informative)
McCain proposed a 500B plan with the provision that any money not spent after 2 positive GDP quarters would not be spent. That was quickly crushed by the dems as they want to pay back all their campaign donors for the next 10 years.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no soup! (Score:3, Informative)
The jobs it will create, if any, are jobs that will be around in 4 to 12 years, not tomorrow or next month or even next year. The idea of the Stimulus is to get jobs sooner then that.
Yes, it will. But it will also take a resource planning comity to select a site for the schools, a study on traffic patterns so you don't have little Susie crossing a highway on the way home like she is playing frogger, an infrastructure upgrade in the area so the water supply lines and the sewage lines can handle 500 extra people and so on. I know, they just relocated a school in my area, ended up building it in the adjacent lot and took up part of the playground to do it. It took over 5 years before they broke ground, then another 2 to put the structure up, 1 year to upgrade the sewage and water supply moving to it and it isn't expected to be open for another year or two.
First you need to determine what kind of broadband will be delivered because of the funding, then you have to figure the layout of the new broadband infrastructure based around existing right of ways withing the limits of the chosen technology. Then if you plan to deliver it to anyone who isn't already being servers by broadband, you will have to negotiate new right of ways and perhaps go to court to secure them is one doesn't already exist. Time Warner wanted to put Cable down my road and the township demanded $3 per customer and Time Warner backed out because they were already going to have to be paying Verizon a conduit charge to tag along their existing right of way.
Both of those scenarios are not just things you can simply do. There are legal requirements, permissions to get, perhaps to force through the courts, and planning as well as other things that need to be accomplished first. It just takes too long to get done.
Here is the problem, if they can't survive debate, then they probably aren't the top priority at the time. This is exactly why they need to be debated and why they need to be processes like regular spending. If we had more pressing needs the School construction, maybe like repairing existing schools or perhaps upgrading them to be more energy efficient so they cost less to operate then we should go that route. Perhaps the wireless spectrum that was just sold can and will fill the broad band gap and do what is necessary there without the use of Government funding. Perhaps when the broadband issues come back around, there will be more money for it because someone can make the case of how important it is instead of one person attempting to sneak it into a bill with no debate.
Both of those issues are things the US government probably shouldn't be involved with anyways, but if they are going to be involved, then it should be discussed and let the chips fall where they may on the merits of the programs.
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:3, Informative)
The argument about cheap labour: it has always been the political elite (in the US that is identical or overlapping with industrialists or large shareholders) that lobbied against enforcing immigration law - because their factories needed the cheap labour. It's not the ordinary people that support the illegal immigrants.
Re:Who is the bloodsucker? (Score:1, Informative)
The problem that caused this crisis was not loans to the poor! Jesus christ, how many times do I have to read this bullshit argument. The problem was the unaccountable "free market" repackaging and trading of those loans, which created a bubble, which popped. People were not getting free loans because of incentives to help the poor. They were getting free loans because the loaner could instantly resell the mortgage at a profit, because there was a bubble and there was wall street greed.
Go do some reading [typepad.com], genius. Better yet, talk to a reputable economist or anyone who worked in banking for the last 3 years, and they'll explain it to you.
Or turn off your brain and blame poor people and liberals. Dumbass.
Re:Who is the bloodsucker? (Score:4, Informative)
Except when you actually look at all the facts rather than latching on to one thing and assuming it is the source of all evil, you find out something interesting:
The mortgages backed by that program had a lower than average failure rate. You see, unregulated lending institutions made the majority of the loans that are now going bankrupt, in fact more than 75% of the loans that had gone bad did not involve the companies in the program you cite at all.
Of course, the whole "it's the mortgages" thing is pretty much off track. It was the unregulated trade in "Mortgage backed assets" that caused the problem. That was free market behavior at it's very essence. The banks sold each other worthless bonds because they could find idiots at the other banks willing to buy worthless junk. They paid a rating agency to rate their mortgages as no risk because of the housing bubble, as long as prices on housing skyrocketed even if someone defaulted on the mortgage they could sell the house for more than the mortgage.
Sorry, but the program you cite isn't a culprit in the financial collapse.
Re:Who is the bloodsucker? (Score:2, Informative)
No, it was socialism that got us into this mess. Not the free market. If anything, GWB is culpable for *not* bringing this issue to the public sooner while in office.
That last President had a vested interest in not bringing it to the public's attention - he and the Fed were continuing a policy of using easy credit to drive housing and housing-related jobs so as to conceal the ill-effects of "trickle-down" economics and inequitable free trade (expecting an American worker to compete with somebody whose cost of living is 1/10th or less of that American worker's is simply ludicrous).
Bush knew what he was doing. In George's own words on June 18th, 2002 (http://www.hud.gov/news/speeches/presremarks.cfm/ [hud.gov]
The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so. The problem is we have what we call a homeownership gap in America. Three-quarters of Anglos own their homes, and yet less than 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanics own homes. That ownership gap signals that something might be wrong in the land of plenty. And we need to do something about it.
We are here in Washington, D.C. to address problems. So I've set this goal for the country. We want 5.5 million more homeowners by 2010 -- million more minority homeowners by 2010. (Applause.) Five-and-a-half million families by 2010 will own a home. That is our goal. It is a realistic goal. But it's going to mean we're going to have to work hard to achieve the goal, all of us. And by all of us, I mean not only the federal government, but the private sector, as well.
And so I want to, one, encourage you to do everything you can to work in a realistic, smart way to get this done. I repeat, we're here for a reason. And part of the reason is to make this dream extend everywhere.
I'm going to do my part by setting the goal, by reminding people of the goal, by heralding the goal, and by calling people into action, both the federal level, state level, local level, and in the private sector. (Applause.)
And so what are the barriers that we can deal with here in Washington? Well, probably the single barrier to first-time homeownership is high down payments. People take a look at the down payment, they say that's too high, I'm not buying. They may have the desire to buy, but they don't have the wherewithal to handle the down payment. We can deal with that. And so I've asked Congress to fully fund an American Dream down payment fund which will help a low-income family to qualify to buy, to buy.(Applause.)
The President of the United States of America gets what he wants from any government organization - to include quasi-governmental organizations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.