$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.
Notice what didn't get completely cut (Score:3, Interesting)
$100 million from law enforcement wireless (original bill $200 million)
$100 million from FBI construction (original bill $400 million)
Need to keep pumping that taxpayer money into law enforcement so they can keep us safe from "obscene porn" http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/optf/ [usdoj.gov] and continue to win the drug war.
Pork (Score:1, Interesting)
Well at least they got rid of the $246Million gift to hollywood [typepad.com]. (no thanks to you kennedy/kerry!)
Still a ways [opencongress.org] to go though.
No no no (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no difference between the parties these days when it comes to spending.
They both want to spend *more*. There is a slight difference in what they want it spent on, but only a little.
Good. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:3, Interesting)
You have it exactly backwards.
It's the Republicans (fascists though they are) that are right in macroeconomic theory and its the Democrats (socialists) that are in fact, operating in ideological mantra that spending is somehow going to work. It didn't work for Austria, didn't work for us in 1930's, didn't work in 1974 and won't work now.
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:4, Interesting)
The way I look at it, they have two ways to handle the economic crisis:
1. Do absolutely nothing and let the economy continue to deflate until we get back to pre-housing bubble status. The problem with this approach is that you'll have 25% unemployment, soup lines that are worse than the great depression, and the entire world will take 10-20 years to pull itself out of the mess, if people don't riot and burn the world down first.
2. Dump money into the economy and continue to prop up the housing bubble by buying failed mortgage debt, hoping for a soft landing. This approach is doomed to failure as well because you can't keep pumping money into a bubble hoping to sustain it forever. The bubble is going to either pop quickly or deflate slowly. This approach only kicks the football down the field another 5-10 years for the next generation of politicians to deal with it.
Guess which approach our government is picking? I guess I'd choose option 2 also but either way we're fucked.
Re:Do democrats even realize that they do in fact (Score:3, Interesting)
So let them filibuster. Let them hold everything else up and yell loudly to the media that the republicans are against saving America!
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:2, Interesting)
First off, there are many examples in the past century of Keynesian economics NOT working (just look at Japan during the 90's). Next, the school construction was for one district in one state (I forget where) that already has new schools! Why would you waste that much money on building a school to replace one that was recently built?! Obama's "Stimulus" (and I use sarcastic quotation marks) bill only has about 10% (in it's original form) going towards anything remotely related to stimulating the economy or upgrading infrastructure. The vast majority of this bill is about throwing away money on pet projects of congressmen / senators so that the uneducated will say "Look, money is being spent by the government, things must be getting better!"
This "stimulus" package will do little to nothing to help the economy and will primarily serve to increase the national debt, increase inflation, and increase government control of our lives. Obama keeps using fear tactics ("If we don't pass this pork bill NOW we'll lose 5-6 million more jobs by 2012!!") to get people to support this crap, when things WILL adjust just fine on their own, it will just take some time. I'm sure someone will scream at me "but what if I lose my job?!", well you know what, I'm currently looking for a job, but I don't have the arrogance to suggest that we should take on a trillion dollars more debt and jump inflation just so that I MIGHT keep my job. The worst thing to do during a down economy is make decisions based on fear. Making smart decisions (living within your means and saving at least some money ever month) will keep you pretty safe (yes, you could lose your job, but if you save then even if you didn't get unemployment you'd still have money to make the house payments and such for awhile).
Another thing to keep in mind, EVERY time in the history of the US that the government has tried a stimulus bill to get out of a recession, by the time the bill was passed the economy was already working it's way up just fine without government intervention. I'm sure SOMEONE will bitch with "sources please", I have a degree in Economics and one of my textbooks in school had the source in it. I'm sure the smart people here can google it (I won't waste my time because the Obamanites will just ignore anything I say anyways).
Re:Great (Score:2, Interesting)
As for education spending, I've always said it should be cut and prioritized. The idea that money allocated to education actually goes to educate kids is a sick joke in this country.
I've never understood this thinking. If schools are wastefully spending money allocated to them, you cut the funding, further hurting children?
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. Public schools are a favorite whipping boy for those with money/power, and of course the system isn't perfect, but the benefits it provides still far outweigh the negatives. The vast, vast majority of teachers in our public schools are responsible, intelligent people who have a love of teaching and want to positively affect the lives of children, just like the vast, vast majority of children in the public school system are good kids who want to learn and succeed.
We whine and bitch about the dumbing down of America, laugh at Idiocracy becoming real before our eyes, yet funding for schools are reduced or cut at nearly every opportunity, teachers are criminally underpaid and forced to purchase their own paper and other supplies, while simultaneously hearing how lazy and apathetic they are, school districts are ordered to arbitrarily improve test scored or risk losing what little funding they receive, while being given no new resources to purchase the equipment or hire the staff they need. We leave our children to these people for 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, we trust them to educate our young, to feed and care for them, often to act as surrogate parents, all the while giving them the bare minimum required to perform this task, and griping or outright refusing any request for more.
If you have such a problem with the way public education is run, then get involved for fucks sake. Join the PTA, run for a position on your local school board. Find out what it's really like, chances are you'll end up being shocked that these schools do as good a job as they do with what little they have to work with. Pound for pound, you're not going to find a group of people who work harder, care more about their jobs, or complain less about their working conditions than teachers.
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:1, Interesting)
When I originally read your post, it came across as so simple-minded that I figured you had to be trolling. But since you actually got an insightful moderation, I'll respond - less to you and more to whoever moderated your post insightful.
If you reduce taxation, more job creation and more spending happens. This is simple math. If you have $2,000 in your pocket at the end of 2 weeks versus having $1,500, what would your response be? If you are younger, odds are you would buy useless junk like more video games, or a bigger t.v., or whatever. If you are older, you might be putting aside that extra 500 for a bigger or better house. Maybe getting some of the repairs done on your existing house.
And what does the government do with taxes? It spends them. Either way, the money gets spent. If "spending", in general, stimulates the economy, then either government or individual spending "stimulates" the economy.
The more sophisticated question, which you seem to be unaware of, is whether government spending or individual spending is more "economically efficient".
Suppose factory can originally make apple pies (good and American) at $4 per pie but then the company takes it's profits and buys a machine that increases the efficiency of the pie making process such that the company can now make pies for $3 per pie: the economy has become more "efficient".
Suppose, instead, that the pie company gives its profits to the CEO who pays a bunch of strippers to dance naked for him. Either way, the money ends up back in the economy - the money either goes to the strippers or to the people who made the efficient pie making machine.
The key difference is that in the first case, apple pies are now $3 per pie whereas in the second case apple pies are still $4 per pie (but the CEO did get to see some nice ass).
So the basic question is whether individual spending or government spending is more economically "efficient". You can argue it either way. Probably (government) spending on education is more efficient than (individual) spending on a PlayStation. On the other hand, if a government is so corrupt that the government spends the money on having strippers perform for government officials then the (individual) spending on PlayStations is more efficient.
Ultimately, the fundamental source of economic efficiency is science and technology discovery and innovation. Anyway, hopefully this will help whoever moderated the parent "insightful" understand that the situation is more complicated than "lower taxes stimulate the economy".
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:3, Interesting)
How is money to Amtrak going to produce jobs? Sure, it helps out the people working for Amtrak, but every passenger on Amtrak is NON-passenger on Greyhound or Delta.
Interesting theory, but from Portland to Seattle (for an example) for me is a choice between Amtrak and driving. I'm not going to pay the premium to fly, needing to get out to PDX and then from SEATAC to downtown when I can take Amtrak much easier, and in about the same amount of time.
Greyhound? No thanks, I'll just drive instead. If we're going to help Delta or any airline (as we've done many, many times) why not help Amtrak which is more appropriate for shorter trips?
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:4, Interesting)
And apparently, magic pixies will simply open up their checkbooks and give you trillions of dollars in taxes, too.
Maybe I'm different than the rest of you, but if I worked for it, I would like to keep it. I'm sick of being taxed out of 50% of everything I earn, so that it can be given to someone who doesn't deserve it.
Don't believe me?
Remember: Your taxes are more than income tax.
Here are some other things you are taxed on: Gasoline. Food. Clothing. Property. Investments. Cigarettes. Beer and Wine. TVs. Cars. Telecom taxes.
An interesting exercise is to take all of your spending for a month, and break it all down into taxes and non-taxes. You'll crap yourself, I promise.
We're getting raped enough with the taxes. Much like the schools, the government has more than enough money. The problem is a lack of accountability and wasteful spending - neither of which you are getting with the new administration.
Oh, don't get me wrong. You didn't have it with the last administration either. I'm not playing sides here, I'm just pointing it out.
More spending is going to help in any case. [wsj.com] Neither will socialism - and make no mistake about it, America is no longer a capitalist nation. That era is now over, thanks to Congress.
He got it from here. (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, as far as your assertion that there endowment is down 30-50%, I doubt that. They have their own money management office that has some very sharp folks investing. Not your typical IRA or retirement money manager like we peons have. Let's say you're right. So now it's down to only 17 billion! Boo hoo! I'm sure they're starving over there!
If they really need it make up for short falls, then why does it keep increasing every year? Ah, more donations - you may say. That's true. As a matter of fact, people who have never even attended Harvard give them money. What I'm saying is, Harvard could piss their entire endowment away, and there would be plenty of folks out there who'd give them money. Why? Because Harvard (and all the other Ivy League schools for that matter) have a name. They'd have their money back in a few years.
As far as research is concerned, I don't know. But the thing is, I see they get a lot of corporate and Government grants for research. I never see anything about Harvard themselves funding something.
Whatever. You can't lump in an Ivy League university with the rest of US higher education. Those folks are in their own league and I would be incredibly surprised if they ever have financial difficulties.
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:5, Interesting)
They are also foundering because:
- We are having to pay OUR tax money to educate the kids of people who illegally entered the country and mooch off all our social services, demanding handouts even as they thumb their noses at our laws.
- Our classes are forced to move at the pace of the slowest fucking idiot, rather than stratifying classes into advanced and non-advanced, moving the smarter kids up to give them greater challenges and keep them from getting bored.
- Thanks to years of parent lawsuits, the very idea of holding a kid back a year because they haven't learned what they needed to learn has gone away. These stupid fucking parents insist "waah but it'll hurt his self-esteem don't you dare cut my kid off from his friends" - I see them every day and want to grab them, shake them, and yell your kid is a fucking moron! He is harming the education of the other kids around him! But nooooo... instead, we socially promote them, so the entire 8th grade class is still trying to read at a 4th grade level. Meanwhile, the smart kids are bored out of their fucking skulls. I've watched a friend's kid actually get sent home with "warnings" from the teacher. What was the kid doing? She was performing like a 4th grader in the 1st grade class. She picked up cursive writing watching her parents. She finished the "math homework" while the teacher was blabbing on trying to teach the rest of the kids how to multiply 2x2, and then got out a copy of The Mysterious Island [wikipedia.org] I'd given as a christmas present and started reading.
US public schools are not foundering because we don't spend enough money. They are foundering because teachers' unions make it impossible to get rid of bad teachers, because school districts do not stratify and have allowed social promotion of retards to become the norm, and because they punish the exemplary kids rather than nurturing their intelligence and love of learning.
And most of this has shit-all to do with monetary spending, too, save for the fact that when the kids of illegals are found in public schools, the administration should be required to report it under penalty of jail time, and INS/ICE should use that as a great opportunity to track down the parents and deport the whole lot.
Re:Republicans are Flat-Earth Economists (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh my God you are so full of crap. No one is saying that building schools won't employ people. What is being said is, "what happens to those jobs when the schools built?" These are not permanent jobs.
You're saying that the Republicans are objecting to creating temporary job funded by the government and instead says they should be permanent?
That is possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
There's a valid objection to construction jobs in that they might not be created fast enough, but the fact they'd not be permanent is a good thing, at least for people worried, as the Republicans so often claim, about spending.
How does giving out condoms provide jobs?
Because condoms are, of course, created by pixies and distributed by the Condom Fairy. (Don't ask what you leave under your pillow to get one.)
How does allocating money so groups like ACORN can purchase houses and rent them out create jobs?
It doesn't 'create jobs', it 'creates cheap housing', something that is also needed during a recession, especially one accompanied by record levels of mortgage failures.
Now these may be great ideas, but they do NOT belong in the "stimulus" package if they do not stimulate. Seriously, how big of a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that?
How big a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that the 'stimulus package' is just a way to refer to a general bill to attempt to help the economy, and hence not every item in it is an attempt to stimulate spending? Many things attempt to help in other ways.
How does extending unemployment benefits create jobs?
And how does naming the bill 'stimulus' create jobs? They should have created an unnamed bill and hired people to make the name! Or named it 'Make jobs or we'll beat you to death with shovels!'
Hey, how does the Republicans arguing to remove things from said bill create jobs?
Re:Yes (Score:2, Interesting)
But... *gasp* that isn't simply the Democrat way! The Democrat way is to simply throw money at a problem without any oversight or planning, call it "solved", and then gasp again when the problem comes up next election cycle and they need to "fix" it by throwing more money without any oversight or planning... repeat ad nauseum.
And while we are at it, lets dump Brown vs. Board of Education [brownvboard.org] too while we are at it, eh? After all, if a state wants to start segregating schools you can just move to another state, right?
Dishonest Debate Tactics 101: set up strawman, knock down strawman. Nobody in this debate has ever suggested re-segregating schools.
Now, there HAS been a suggestion which has been sometimes accused of such, which is that of repealing mandatory busing and sending most kids to the school closest to their home. Since ethnotypes and immigrant populations tend to self-segregate in choice of living locations, this would mean that, yes, you'd have a number of schools that wound up looking like they were "segregated." The upside to this, however, is that it makes parental involvement and community involvement more likely. Kids who are bused to school for 3+ hours every day don't participate in extracurriculars as much. They don't have as much time to work on their homework or study. Their parents aren't as involved in the school as when it's right in the neighborhood, either. And as mentioned above, involved parents = better performing kids.
Or if the state wants all their public schools to teach intelligent design, you should either hold your nose or move--under no circumstance should you appeal to those pesky activist judges in the the federal courts, right?
Funny. There are all sorts of things you could have mentioned here - sex education about homosexuality during kindergarten, pro-"one world government" propaganda, moral relativism, revisionist history that tries to paint honest and noble men (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson) as evil bastards and evil bastards (Che Guevara) as noble men... What had you on "intelligent design"?
Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Do you know who is paying for this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes. Also remember that many people file jointly, so that $109,000 is really more like a married couple, both of whom work, each making $54,000.
Uhh, no. Stop making up math. Two people making $54,500 each do not equal one taxpayer making $109,000. My wife and I together make around $150,000, but, individually, we make about $75,000 each. Thus we are clearly not in that top bracket you are talking about. Only two-adult families with one income-earning worker might possibly fit in your picture, and those A) are rare and B) benefit from cost savings in other ways.
So, doing some simple math I compute that those top 10% (roughly 14 million taxpayers) are responsible for $800,000,000,000 times 0.71, or about $40,000 each. Think about that. Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes.
That top 10% is a wide range, you know? Why did you just divide the tax burden equally among those at your arbitrary 10% cutoff? If (and I'm making this number up) the top 5% pay 50% of taxes, doesn't that mean the top 5% (using your math) should pay $57,000 in taxes each, while the second 5% (including your favorite $109,000 earner) should only pay $24,000? Or maybe divide it somewhere else? Or maybe recognize that it's a gradual scale and making arbitrary divisions only serves those looking to manipulate statistics?
Most people with that income have lost several times that in their retirement plans in the last year (another made up statistic by me), and would love to give up $24,000 if it meant the economy turned around and they regained the rest of their lost wealth before they wanted to retire.
your hard-earned money
My money does a lot of things, including pay for my lifestyle, but it also pays for the education of other people's children (we have none) and other people's defense and other people's roads (we mostly use toll roads). And yet all of those things benefit us, too, so I'm perfectly happy to pay for them.
Fortunately you benefit from them too, and so you get to pay as well. Isn't civilized society a great place to live?
Re:Do you know who is paying for this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Um, you FAIL MATH FOREVER.
I can't even begin to list what is horrible wrong with your math, but here's a hint:
You realize that total US yearly revenue is 1.75 trillion right? Which, according to your logic, means a person making $109,000 a year currently pays about $90,000 in taxes. Seems like they would have caught on at some point that, after taxes, they're living below poverty level and eligible for government aid.
Or, you know, you've insanely taken a group that pays an average of 71% of taxes and extrapolated those taxes onto the minimum people fitting in that group.
That's not even getting into your completely incorrect assumption about joint filing. Joint filing does not work that way. If it just magically added up incomes and treated them as a single person, no one would ever do it, as it would always push people into higher tax brackets. Duh.
Incidentally, any web page that lists the 'percentage' of total taxes pay by income percentage is lying. Lying by statistics.
We don't tax people by head, we tax them by income. Comparing the number of people to taxes paid is inherently dishonest. The top 10% of the people may, indeed, be paying 71% of the income taxes, but they're making like 60% of the income, which is, of course, what the income tax is taxing.
Here's an actual [lanekenworthy.net] view of the situation, although it's only by quintile. Once it got to 10% and 5% and 1% it the amount of taxes would, indeed, go up somewhat, but not to the amount you're imagining.
Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is the government and the parents.
I just took a look at the private school I attended. Kindergarten tuition is now $8,310, grades 1-8 is $7,630 and high school is $11,690. That gives you a total of $116,110 for K-12 education. The school receives no federal or state tax dollars, and is better than every single public school, and most of the private schools, in the state.
At the very least it's absolutely pathetic that the state manages to spend five times as much money, for poor results.
Re:No, easy. (Score:3, Interesting)
That approach has two side-effects, both horrifying to Washington:
1. The money would be spent on the specific needs of each citizen, and not on the needs of Das Kapital.
2. Any mechanism of consolidation of power to Washington would be eliminated. When "the people" buy a badly needed refrigerator, who will be there to negotiate for another refrigerator for their state senator's vacation home in Florida?
Re:Do you know who is paying for this? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm glad someone took the GP to task for that horrible bit of innumeracy. I think it's fair to go a little farther and estimate that a 109k household will pay on the order of 2/3 the tax of a 154k household, so we're talking around $8K rather than $13K. That's still quite a bit, and people are justified in their concern that the money be spent in a way which will have a net effect rather than just shifting things around to less efficient uses e.g. from Greyhound to Amtrak.
Let's ignore for the moment that this is deficit spending, so no one's taxes will be raised.
Let's not. Where, exactly, do you think it comes from?
A) Borrowed from people by issuing treasury bonds or other debt instruments
That just means they'll have to tax people later to pay for the original spending. (Plus, given that the Fed is BUYING treasury bonds like crazy to force the interest rate down, this seems unlikely.)
B) Spent without taking or getting it from anyone
This is inflation, which is actually a hidden tax (on savings, rather than income). Allow me to illustrate:
According to http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/hist/h6hist1.txt [federalreserve.gov], the current M2 money supply is around 8 trillion. Let's pretend that's the best measure and run through a couple different hypothetical scenarios:
1) The government says "we are going to take 10% of your dollars and spend it on things." This is a regular tax of $800B, albeit based on accumulated money (how many dollars you own) rather than income (how many dollars you gained this year). Price levels don't really change, although money is redistributed a bit depending what the government does with it. (Assuming it's for "stimulus," price levels of consumer goods might actually increase, since the spending will be targeted to people who are more likely to spend it again on consumption.)
2) The government says "we are changing the US currency from the 'Dollar' to the 'Tollar.' We are going to create 10% more Tollars than Dollars, and everyone will be given 1.1 Tollars for each Dollar they previously had." Just before the day of the switch, you could buy a loaf of bread for $3.00. After the switch, it will cost exactly T3.30, because $1.00 = T1.10 by definition. Since you have 10% more Tollars, this doesn't mean anything to your consumption or earnings possibilities.
3) The government says "we aren't going to change the name, but we are going to create 10% more Dollars, and everyone will be given an additional 10c for each Dollar they previously had." This is exactly the same case as (2). The name of a currency is irrelevant. After this distribution of 10% extra dollars to everyone who owned dollars, the loaf of bread will rise from $3.00 to $3.30, and nobody will be able to buy any more or less than they previously could, just like with the switch to Tollars. Dollars devalue by 10%.
4) The government does (3), and then (1). (3) has no actual impact of quality of living (unless you were trading on the currency exchange), and (1) has the normal impact of a 10% tax on all savings, so the net impact of (4) is basically the same as (1).
5) The government says "we are going to create 10% more Dollars, and spend them instead of giving them to you." This is like (4), but just cutting out the administrative step of giving people money and then taking it back. The net impact will be the same as (4), which is the same as (1).
So you can see that an inflation-funded spending program of $800B will have the same effect (once the money is spent) of taxing everyone 10% on their accumulated savings! It would be beyond the scope of this post to discuss whether or not that's a good idea. I simply wanted to demonstrate that deficit spending is not some magic way to avoid taxing people. It just changes where and when the tax is applied. It will either come now or later, as an income tax, inflation tax, or something els
Re:no soup! (Score:5, Interesting)
Obama is not your saviour. He is a politician, and the USA is driven by lobbyists whom the best of are backed by the richest corporations.
Want too see how bad things really are for the USA.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca2_1234032281 [liveleak.com] Wait till about 2:20 in.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Most reputable economists think that with monetary policy maxed out (interest rates are effectively zero), the only thing we can do to stop the bleeding is to use fiscal policy, i.e., spend a ton of money and pray.
Yeesh. What a mischaracterization.
Most reputable economists agree that the interest rates should never have been allowed to get where they are. Constantly jacking them down was foolhardy.
"Spend a ton of money and pray" - the economy has the equivalent of a sprained ankle, currently. "Spend a ton of money and pray" is the equivalent of chopping a leg off to make the pain of the sprained ankle go away: it's a fucking moron's decision.
There has to be a recentering in several markets - housing prices have to come down. Lending standards have to recenter based on the Three C's (Capital, Capacity, Consistency/Credit Score) such that new loans aren't as ridiculously risky as the ACORN/Obama-bred crap loans that are far too common in the current housing market. There is no way to get around having pain because of this. Jobs are going to be lost. Businesses are going to fold or go through bankruptcy proceedings. Yes, it sucks. Trying to make it "less painful" is, however, far worse for the economy - the longer housing prices stay far too high, for example, the more mortgages are simply going to fail, and the less new mortgages will be able to be offered at the right price.
And yes, some of the economy is just gone. This has been a big shock. A large number of people have finally come to their senses and realized that pushing an inflated house note, second and third mortgage, car loans, and $50,000 in credit card debt simply is not sustainable. They will have to do what the responsible ones of us have done the rest of the time, and learn to live within their means. This means a lot less impulse buying. This means a sizable chunk of the retail economy is going to go away. So Be It.
It's time to start being fiscally responsible on all fronts. This means yes, the government should fucking balance the budget. Yes, this means that people with less than 600 credit score and zero down payment should be laughed out of the office when trying to get a home or business loan. And yes, this means we should dump "free trade" policies and instead institute "fair trade" - zero tariffs only for countries that match or better our own worker protection and environmental laws. Start giving real incentives to companies that keep jobs in the US, and penalties to companies that ship jobs out. Michael Dell is too fucking cheap to pay for labor in the country that made him rich, and instead likes using Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian slave labor? Fuck him. Slap a tariff on his goods till he comes home. Somebody else hires call center people working 16-hour days 6 days a week at $10/week? Fuck that shit. They can pay the tax and eat it, or hire someplace with fair labor laws.
Re:The most useful cut first as usual (Score:2, Interesting)
Please don't repeat this completely discredited meme. You only look foolish doing so.
The truth is that the public sector and the private sector both do things very well and very badly. Mostly because human beings run both of them.
There are plenty of examples of effective government programs, just as there are plenty examples of failed private programs.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Good change: Removed a gift to Verizon! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not going to get involved in the big debate over Keynes vs. the gold bugs. Just on the actual topic of the subject note...
The House had a $6B broadband appropriation, divided between rural (Dept. of Agriculture) and not-necessarily-rural (NTIA) programs. The Senate totally rewrote those sections. Sen. Rockefeller (D-Verizon) added about $2B for "advanced broadband" defined as 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up, in the form of a corporate tax credit, for new service to any residential customer. Even if only a tiny percentage took the higher speed, and it was totally closed to competitive Internet or telephone services.
So the grant could not be used by most standalone ISPs, because they're generally not profitable (so no need for a tax credit), or aren't Corporations (partnerships, municipalities, non-profits, etc., don't get anything). Nor could cable (upstream speed limits) or AT&T (U-Verse is too slow). The money had exactly one recipient in mind, It was a subsidy for pulling FiOS in suburban areas to compete with established cable companies and ISPs. The "underserved" areas could include Tampa, New York City, Short Hills, Santa Monica, or Chevy Chase.
The subsidy would have added precisely zero new FiOS lines, since it would have covered their existing plans. It was just more money for Ivan Seidenberg's bonus. Good riddance!
Re:no soup! (Score:3, Interesting)
Science is "pork" on this bill because the purpose of this bill is to stimulate the economy from the bottom up. And /., of all places, should know that science seems to have no place at the bottom of America... Seriously, "science" is such a general term that it doesn't really say what it's for. R&D? That has a future payout, like infrastructure, but only if it succeeds in finding something of value (cure for cancer, AIDS, etc., or proves the toxicity or carcinogenic nature of something, or disproves the toxicity or carcinogenic natures of something commercial, or finds new materials for building things better, etc.) Most of science seems to get results that are, let's face it, uninteresting. "Chemical X does not correlate with condition Y." It's useful knowledge in that it eliminates (or supports the elimination of) something. But that's not going to stimulate anything.
Science is probably also pork if it's moneys targetted to special interest groups - such as a specific Senator's home state college - especially if it's solely to get their vote.
Similarly, without having RTFA, the construction costs for education are much more convoluted than, say, building more roads and bridges. You need to ensure you're putting schools where they're needed, and not just in some CongressCritter's back yard, again, to get their vote. Proving additional road infrastructure as useful where you put it is MUCH simpler than proving optimal (or near-optimal) school placement.
I'm not saying that this is money poorly spent. Merely that I agree with sumdumass' assessment that these probably should be debated on their merits rather than rammed through with the stimulus package.
Re:No, easy. (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem of that is the following:
- How much of that money would be spent and how much would be saved?
The modern financial system is (or at least was, until recently) a big machine designed to make money go around and around and around:
- People buy stuff; that money goes to companies that sell the stuff; the companies then pay the salaries; the employees buy stuff with their salaries and so forth. In a similar way, companies buy stuff from other companies which in turn buy stuff from yet other companies.
- Banks sit in the middle of another cycle where people put their money in savings accounts; banks lend that money to other people; people buy (big) stuff; yet other people receive money for the big stuff; those people the money in their savings accounts.
This big money moving machine means that in practice, each dollar in circulation goes round and round, and represents a lot more wealth that if it just stays put.
The problem is that the machine is broken and money isn't going around - while before each dollar was being used to pay stuff 24 times (!) it's now not being passed quite as much - this means that that one dollar which was part of paying 4 or 5 salaries is now involved in paying just 1 or 2.
So, where are those dollars getting stuck:
- People don't buy as much stuff as before.
- Money which was going out to other countries to pay for things like oil is not coming back anymore (oil producing countries were some of the biggest lenders to the US).
- Banks are receiving deposits but not lending that money onwards since they lost lots of money in credit derivatives and their capital ratios are under threat.
The US government is trying to find a way of pushing dollars into the system in such a way that it makes the wheels start turning again and that money starts going around.
Just giving money to people is unlikely to work since in the current conditions (fear and uncertainty) people are more likely to keep the money rather than spend it.
There are some radical ideas being discussed that do involve giving the money directly to people but in such a way that they are forced to spend it - for example as vouchers that quickly loose value as time goes by (say, each month the voucher is worth 20% less) which can be used to buy things in stores.
Personally I believe that giving the money to people in a quickly devaluating voucher form would go a lot farther in evenly, fairly spreading the money through the whole economy and making the economy wheels start rotating again than to give it directly to those companies that have the most lobbyists and whine the most ...