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Friday, February 06, 2009
Forget that no-earmarks pledge
Remember how Obama and Biden vowed that there would absolutely no earmarks in the so-called stimulus bill. Well, of course, any bill that has that much money at stake is going to include earmarks and ProPublica, part of the Sunlight Foundation, is listing the earmarks that they're finding in this bill. My favorite is the $198,000,000 for Filipino World War II veterans that Hawaii's Senator Inouye placed in the bill. That might be a perfectly fine thing to do, but it doesn't have a thing to do with stimulating our economy. Most of those veterans don't even live in the United States. Why put it in an emergency stimulus bill instead of debating them under normal budgetary procedures?
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Economics
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1 comments:
Betsy,
I think you know the answer to your question but for those who missed Rahm Emanuel's pronouncement:
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
http://tinyurl.com/amsnt4
You take that opportunistic philosophy and combine it with a heaping dose of Chicago-style "Pay for Play" handouts to key Senators like Inouye and a multitude of other powerful and expectant constituencies and you get this pork-u-lus bill.
It could easily become Obama's undoing.
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