Posted on 02/13/2010 7:06:36 AM PST by dajeeps
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- States are looking to the federal government for more help balancing their budgets, but the Senate is not heeding their call.
Federal aid to the states was among the top priorities in an early Senate job creation bill, as well as in a $154 billion measure passed by the House in December. But it has fallen off the list as Senate Democrats look to craft legislation that will attract bipartisan support.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Thursday unveiled a jobs bill that does not contain state aid. A Senate Democratic aide said Reid hopes to back a state aid measure in the future. Republican support, however, remains questionable.
Experts and state officials say they need to know now whether they'll get more funds. Governors are currently crafting their budgets and, for many, it will be their third year of contending with massive deficits due to declining tax revenues
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
I think I'd rather not have government sucking money out of the private sector to drive the economy in ways that are inefficient and wasteful. The government spending bubble caused by redirection of investment money to governments in the Recourse Rule in Basel II has got to burst so we can get back to real capitialism and more efficient markets.
To paraphrase John kerry, it was a stimulus before it was a jobs bill.
These states can live within their means and cut spending.
They don’t need more Federal tax dollars.
Try privatizing and cutting back on servivces.
Harry’s jobs bill:
“Any new job created with Federal money has to be a union job. Funding for this legislation will come from a new 90% tax on Social Security benefits and a 100% tax on lemmonade stands.”
Senators should be able to read and understand the above bill summary in about 1 minute. It will be posted on the Senate website for 2 seconds and C-Span will be allowed to cover the debate for long enough to read this summary. Debate will be limited to one word for each side of the aisle. Republicans will not be allowed to offer up any ammendments. The bill will be brought up for a vote during the next Republican retreat.
I just caught a news flash that most of our cities and states are going broke.
This is because: (Choose all that apply)
1. Programs mandated by the feds but funded by the localities have been out of control for decades.
2. Many of our states and cities have been – and are — run by folks many of us elected after they promised us FREE pie-in-the-sky goodies NOW, not in the bye-n-bye. These local people are identical to the leftists now controlling the national government, only on a smaller scale. Many of them hope to – and some will – move up to the big show later in their careers. The critical difference between the locals and the feds is that the feds can legally – albeit immorally — print money.
3. Our citizens have embraced a philosophy beloved of the late Romans: “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.”
But NOT TO WORRY. The bailouts will continue as long as necessary.
The leftist gaggle nominally in charge of the federal government will simply resort to the last mechanism traditionally used by all governments in the final throes of national suicide: THE PRINTING PRESS. They’ve already done a good but of that with the TARP and SPENDULOUS pograms – er – PROGRAMS.
But when the excrement makes contact with the rotating air-handling device in the states – and it appears that day is neigh – the federales will have to accelerate the process and we’ll soon be hauling wheelbarrows filled with increasingly worthless FRAUDS (Federal Reserve Accounting Unit Denominators erroneously called “dollars”) to the store for a loaf of bread or a jug of milk. Our experience will make the Weimar Republic look like a warm-up exercise.
German workers then were paid several times a day and, bundling the marks into shop rags, threw them from the factory windows to their waiting wives so they could get to the store before the shopkeeper raised prices – for the third or fourth time that DAY.
One poor fellow left his paper currency filled wheelbarrow on the street to go into another shop only to return to a pile of currency dumped on the street. Another had stolen his more valuable wheelbarrow.
A more recent example of what we face is now occurring in Zimbabwe. Formerly Rhodesia, it was once the breadbasket of Africa. Today under the Marxist tyrant Mugabe, the people there are starving and suffering under a horrendous inflation. They have overprinted their paper currency several times adding groups of zeroes each time.
If you know what’s coming you will understand why Obama is calling for massive tax hikes? It is a foredoomed effort to suck up the excess FRAUDS soon to be sloshing around in what remains of this economy in a vain attempt to keep the less alert – but well armed — among us from catching on and hitting the streets.
Having said that, the states probably deserve to suffer for their abandonment of their Constitutionally mandated role to guard the integrity of the money of account at Article 1, Section 10. Read it if you never have. The language is perfectly clear. It is even clearer if you read the notes of the Constitutional Convention surrounding that important debate. You know — all that “old stuff” North Carolina’s educrats now seek to chuck down the Orwellian memory hole.
Here endth the sermon.
And probably the America in which those of us of a certain age grew up.
How sad for our kids and grandkids.
Me to States — NO! Government at ALL levels wastes too MUCH money! Solve your own problems!
This makes no sense to me. We’re talking about:
1. The Fed taking money from all taxpayers
2. Redistributing the money to state governments
Why would we want this?
We should leave the money in the state that produced the value in the first place.
States should be funded by their own taxpayers. Then, it’s the citizens who pay the bills that get to elect their own state representatives.
That would promote state “diversity.” (heh)
Here’s an idea - how about the states living within their own budgets. Where do the states think the federal money comes from?
Perhaps Rev. Wright was more prescient than he knew. America's chickens ARE coming home to rooooostahhh. Unfortunately for us it is the result of what the reverend is preaching and Obama is doing.
The states who are in trouble are mostly affected by the local level entitlements of federal welfare programs. That, and the costs of union controlled, federally regulated public schools.
What is the Democrat response? Keep feeding the alligator.
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