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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hailed President Obama’s stimulus program on Sunday, telling ABC’s “This Week” that within one month of Obama’s inauguration, “he signed a bill which saved or created 4 million jobs.” Pelosi invoked the controversial $832-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to unfavorably compare President Donald Trump to former President Obama at the one-month mark: “What has the Trump administration done from their inaugural address, where they talked about decay and carnage? They've done nothing except put Wall Street first, make America sick again, instill fear in our immigrant population in our country, and make sure...

While traveling across the country with your kids this summer, be sure to buckle-up and do your best to overlook all the potholes and crumbling bridges out there. Even if funding was available, things will probably remain in disrepair until your kids are grown, thanks to big government regulations and red tape. Former Obama administration's U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray Lahood told CNN's Rene Marsh during a recent four-part investigative report that America is "like a Third World country" when it comes to infrastructure and said, "The reason we have 57,000 deficient bridges is because we have not made the...

President Barack Obama is heading to Florida to tout the benefits of the massive economic stimulus bill he signed shortly after taking office seven years ago. Obama pumped more than $760 billion into a then-slumping economy beginning in early 2009 in a frantic effort to halt the worst economic downturn in generations. It was an unsettling period for many Americans as hundreds of thousands of jobs disappeared, unemployment climbed into double digits and home values plummeted. Obama will argue during a stop in Jacksonville on Friday that the country is on a more solid footing because of this and other...

Open thread to write the 2017 stimulus act. Republican and Democrat versions welcome.

Navy jet takes off from U.S.S. Ronald Reagan. (U.S. Navy photo) (CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration’s deal to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuel for Navy jets comes at a cost of up to nine times higher than regular fuel, a spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said, coming at a time when the U.S. military is already facing deep budget cuts. Inhofe, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has supported biofuel projects in the past, but has problems with a program the U.S. Department of Agriculture...

If you want to see where a little bit of your $833 billion stimulus went, head south from St. Louis on Interstate 44 until you reach the Mark Twain National Forest. On March 13, 2009, less than a month after President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) into law, the federal government awarded $462,912.30 to a Spokane, Washington, construction firm called CXT Incorporated to build and install 22 “precast concrete toilets” in the park. These bunker-style commodes did not add to the number of bathrooms in the forest; they replaced existing toilets that didn’t meet Forest Service...

Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world's richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

When Evergreen Solar announced it was filing bankruptcy this week, the news sparked a flurry of stories pointing out how the “green” solar panel company had received money from the federal stimulus. The Massachusetts-based company was held up as another example of wasted taxpayers’ dollars under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). But Evergreen Solar may be a better example of just how complicated and difficult it can be to track the massive $821 billion federal stimulus. Because despite the White House and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick both citing Evergreen Solar as receiving stimulus money, the government’s website that...

Three days after the U.S. Department of Labor reported that the national unemployment rate had ticked up from 9.1 percent in May to 9.2 percent in June, President Barack Obama said that the loss of jobs in the public sector is “evidence” that his $830-billion economic stimulus legislation worked. “Now, without relitigating the past, I’m absolutely convinced, and the vast majority of economists are convinced, that the steps we took in the Recovery Act saved millions of people their jobs or created a whole bunch of jobs,” Obama said at his Monday press conference. “And part of the evidence of...

Something about Project Gunrunner (gunwalker, fast and furious) has been bugging me but I just couldn't put my finger on it. This morning when I woke up I remember seeing Project Gunrunner in a bill that was discussed here. The original thread about it was a rumor thread that HR45 had been rolled into the stimulus package. In that thread I scanned the text of H.R.1 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for gun, firearm, etc and came up with a hit. I posted in the thread: "Only time “gun” or “firearm” appears is in the part that give...

The federal government gave California's state government $120.7 billion in the 2009-10 fiscal year to underwrite education, health services, welfare grants and dozens of other programs, a very detailed new report from the state auditor's office reveals. More than a sixth of the money - $23 billion - may have been a one-time injection of funds, however, because it came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, otherwise known as "stimulus." Those funds eased the state's budget crisis, especially in education finance, and their disappearance has exacerbated the current budget deficit. Education was the largest single category of...

I recently visited Saipan (largest island in the "Northern Mariannas Confederation). Saipan was a Japanese "protectorate" from 1918 until 1944. Saipan is a Japanese resort area. Their Main St. looks like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. There are literally thousands of Japanese (and some Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese and South Koreans) swarming the streets. The aiport for Saipan was named "Aslito Field" when the Japanese held the island. When we captured the Island, the airport was renamed "Isley Field" for a Naval Aviator killed during the battle for Saipan. The airport has been renamed "Aslito Airport". The US government has spent...

With the economic recovery sputtering and the midterm elections approaching, President Obama is considering additional tax credits and tax breaks, additional spending on clean energy and infrastructure — in other words, additional stimulus. But don't call it stimulus! In a recent Politico story about Obama's plans for "emergency fixes to stimulate the economy," the White House press office refused to comment on the scope "other than to say it won't be a 'second stimulus.'" It's a strange situation. The White House believes the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 helped avoid a depression and end a recession, saving or...

ST. LOUIS • Stacey Wright had more than a dozen choices when it came to enrolling three of her children in an elementary school, from charters to magnets to traditional public schools in every corner of the city. She chose Jefferson Elementary School, the brick St. Louis public school across the street. And for that, she may get $900. For the first time, a local organization is offering parents a cash incentive to enroll their children at Jefferson. ~ SNIP ~ Proponents say the cash rewards are no different from offering college scholarships to top achievers at a high school,...

Project: Computational Creativity: Building Model of Machine—Generated Humor • Start Date: June 1, 2009 • Total Award Amount: $712,883 NSF Award in Computer & Information Science & Engineering How the results of this project will benefit society: Computational creativity has been a goal of artificial intelligence since nearly its inception. But while many interesting models have been developed, and some of these have produced interesting creative works, most have been built on foundations that either don’t scale, or don’t easily scope across different domains, or both. This project will create intelligent comedic performance agents and deploy them both on- and...

On the road leading to Dulles Airport outside Washington, DC there's a 10' x 11' road sign touting a runway improvement project funded by the federal stimulus. The project cost nearly $15 million and has created 17 jobs, according to recovery.gov. However, there's another number that caught the eye of ABC News: $10,000. That's how much money the Washington Airports Authority tells ABC News it spent to make and install the sign – a single sign – announcing that the project is "Funded by The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act" and is "Putting America Back to Work." The money for...

Embattled Metra Executive Director Phil Pagano, under investigation by his own agency for financial issues, threw himself in front of a Metra train this morning and was killed, sources said. It happened in an unincorporated area near Crystal Lake just after 8 a.m.

In an ominous sign of a still-spreading political scandal, federal officials are probing potential misuse of U.S. funds by exiled Metra chief Phil Pagano. In a series of developments, U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who has helped Metra obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants in recent years, called on the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation to "investigate whether any federal funds were misused or spent in any unauthorized way." Mr. Durbin's action came after the Federal Transit Administration — the USDOT unit that actually makes grants to transit operators — put Metra on restricted...

Topic: Economic StimulusTotal Allocated Cost: $862,000,000,000 *   In February 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In early 2009, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Recovery Act's combined spending and tax provisions would cost $787 billion. In early 2010, CBO updated its estimate of the cost of the Recovery Act. It now estimates that the Recovery Act will cost $75 billion more than originally estimated - CBO now anticipates that the 2009 Stimulus will increase deficits by $862 billion over ten years. *Source: Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget  

Note Video included at article link. SNIPPET: "(CNSNews.com) - The Internal Revenue Service has launched a new global program to target what it calls “high wealth individuals,” IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said Monday. “Through our new global high wealth operating unit we are taking a unified look at the entire web of business and economic entities controlled by high wealth individuals so we can better assess the risk such arrangements pose to tax compliance,” Shulman said at the National Press Club on Monday. Shulman said the IRS is using “our robust and evolving enforcement program that ensures that everyone pays...