So...stop giving out the federal money.
Let these cities and states use their own tax money.
How about free college degrees? That's the ticket.
I want a free PhD. In something useful...like, say, Gender Studies.
A lot of good it does us to have a Republican Senate and Republican President.
And I just got a letter from the National Republican Senatorial Committee promising me great things it the Republicans won both the Senate and House.
Well, I would feel a lot better about that if were getting even mediocre things with having 2/3 of government in their control.
Spending huge of amounts of money that the government doesn’t have and will never have just doesn’t sound like responsible government to me. I don’t even hear words of remorse coming from these guys. Just more of the same. “We’re going to get this money out there to these needy people who are only needy because we won’t let them work.
What we see today is a classic example of how this famous chart works in real life:
Basically, these trillion dollar packages are used to buy votes and influence. And there is nobody telling them they cannot do it. Certainly not the President, or anyone in the Republican Party.
Back when they passed the execrable American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, I did some digging on how money was being spent, and it made my damned blood boil.
Free money. Being passed out with the ostensible purpose of applying it to "shovel ready" (I have a shovel for their asses) jobs to "jump start" the economy and repair infrastructure.
Thank goodness we don't see them anymore, but back then, every time I saw one of these signs:
I want to go out shopping for one of these:
It pissed me off then, the same way seeing "Black Lives Matter", "We Believe", and "No Hate Here" signs on the lawns of ignorant, useful idiots today.
In an extremely wealthy town near where I live, one of the wealthiest communities in the state, there was an old, abandoned Army base that had been closed up for years, and sometime in the last ten years or so, it was opened to the public to be able to walk through. It was great.
Not many people knew about it or knew it was open, and one could walk on dilapidated old crumbling roads through the woods, punctuated by an occasional boarded up decaying building. Most interestingly, there are a series of huge concrete munitions bunkers with evidence of railroad (possibly small gage) that serviced the bunkers, and on a few of them, you could get inside to find old, empty metal desks, light fixtures in the overhead with old fashioned incandescent bulbs in them.
Then, within a year or two after that damned bill was passed, my wife and I went for a wintertime snow walk there, and came across this facility:
Now, just seeing that sign makes my blood pressure go up, but as I looked over the facility, I got angrier and angrier.
There was apparently no expense spared to build this facility, everything built of the highest quality materials, I do believe there were solar electricity panels on the roof (not sure though) but it didn't look like they skimped on anything. As I looked through the windows of the closed facility, I even saw Herman Miller chairs in what looked like an office. Bottom line, I see this, and figure they probably spent at LEAST a million or two on this facility, probably more, and now have it staffed with a park ranger or two. All this money WE DON'T HAVE for one or two government employee FTE's. Don't get me wrong, I like parks and such. BUT YOU DON'T SPEND MONEY YOU HAVE TO BORROW TO BUILD THEM! If times are prosperous, just maybe you can do it, but when we have a national debt burden approaching a million dollars per household in this country, it is INSANITY to spend money on this type of thing.
So I decided to try to find out just how much of the 2009 "stimulus" was spent on this boondoggle. There was a website in my state (now a dead link, no surprise there...it went dead probably in August 2012...just in time for the election, lest someone start digging around I suppose) as an an attempt to live up to the Obama administration's promise of "transparency".
On the site, you could dig around in a variety of ways to see data, one way was to slice it is by project, another way shows funds by zip code. Unfortunately, they make it so you cannot download all the funds for all state zip codes, but at least you can download data for a given zip code for a given fiscal quarter.
Now, I never did find out how much was spent on that facility. But what I did find out was interesting.
I downloaded the data for that wealthy town in successive passes for each fiscal quarter and got them all into an Excel spreadsheet. Once there, I used a pivot table to slice the data in a variety of ways. The column on the left is a general category, and the categories from left to right are subcategories of that. I specified that I only wanted to see the top four, and specifically excluded the Police and Firefighter components, but since the total money awarded was $25.2 million and this table shows an expenditure of $23.13 million, that means all other expenditures for this community that I didn't show totaled just over two million dollars. So my table below shows the lion's share.
(I only showed money awarded, not money used, but gee whiz, is anyone concerned they would get awarded the money and not use it? I'm not...)
As I went through the data, I kept seeing an entry for Minuteman Nashoba Heath, and it was a large chunk twice a year. Doing a search on the Internet showed this website: "Minuteman Nashoba Health Group" (Again, now a dead link). They describe themselves as such:
"The Minuteman Nashoba Health Group (MNHG) is a coalition of Massachusetts towns and school districts that have joined together to purchase health benefits for their employees, retirees, and their eligible dependents. Joint purchasing of health benefits gives the participating governmental employers purchasing clout to help keep costs under control. The MNHG has been operational since 1990 and has added several towns to its membership in the last several years."
I don't know what the cost for healthcare is for teachers in that town, but it looks from a couple of things I have seen that teachers might contribute between 20-30% of their own money towards their premium. Bottom line, you folks down in Texas, all you Freepers in California, even you Sooners out in Oklahoma, your tax dollars were (and probably still are) all paying for the health care of unionized Massachusetts teachers.
I did not choose this wealthy town for analysis because of some perceived corruption. I don't believe it is any more or less corrupt than any other community in this country. It just happened to be the community I was looking at to find out about something else, and this fell out of it. What is unspeakable in my opinion is the fact that we took hundreds of billions of dollars we didn't have, and opened the coffers for every community around the nation to dip their hands into. To me, this is the equivalent of a family that cannot meet their mortgage (or their second and third concurrent and outstanding Home Equity Loan) pay their car insurance or keep up with any of the other bills they have incurred, taking out a fourth home equity loan, withdrawing it in cash and distributing it throughout the family.
"Hey everyone, I'm going to buy a new boat, Mom is going to get a sports car, you kids can take the rest of this and spend it on whatever you wish! Computers, video games, clothes, whatever you want! You don't have to tell me precisely what you are doing with it (and even if you do tell me, I'll just wink and approve!) and you won't have to pay any of it back! This is FREE MONEY, and we are going to have a great time with it!"
That whole stimulus bill was a scam, as these multi-trillion dollar bills passed are as well. We were told then and now that this stimulus was supposed to provide "shovel ready jobs" that would stimulate the economy, but from looking at the expenditures, it is clear that, in one of the single, wealthiest communities in my state, 25 million dollars of stimulus money was spent, and the vast majority of it appears to be spent NOT on "shovel ready jobs" (whatever the HELL that means) but instead for paying for unemployment benefits, benefits for teachers and other "unspecified" educational costs (that detail could not be teased out of the spreadsheet, since it is not broken down that way).
Spending the money on unemployment benefits may or may not be the best use for that money, but I think there should have at least been a dialogue about the wisdom of using it. It might indeed be the best use of our taxpayer money, but nobody got to even discuss it. It was just used to pay for these things...AND THOSE USES WERE NOT WHAT THE "STIMULUS" WAS SOLD AS. Brain dead liberals think (and many 'conservative" politicians go right along with it) that pumping borrowed/printed money back into the hands of the unemployed so it can be used to pay bills actually STIMULATES an economy. (Ask Nancy Pelosi...SHE thinks it does, and has said so.)
Many of us recognize that the stimulus was a bill of goods, being used primarily by many communities to cover shortfalls, and who could blame those communities for doing so. But the unimpeachable idiocy of declaring that this money was going to stimulate anything is apparent, and it is yet another instance of the dishonesty of the liberals (and so-called "conservatives") who not only supported this expenditure back in 2009, but are now pushing for more money WE DON'T HAVE to be thrown down the rat-hole in these COVID-19 trillion dollar spending packages.