Wed Feb 4, 4:32 pm ET
Last week, the House passed the then-$819 billion stimulus bill — without a single Republican vote. GOP senators vowed to oppose it as well, calling it a colossal waste of money, packed with pork and non-essential spending.
NBC broke down some of the bigger numbers in the bill, for example: $275 billion in tax relief, $90 billion for infrastructure, $79 billion for school funding, etc. Sounds good, right? But in the fine print, there's a lot of proposed spending that may raise a few eyebrows. In an interview with President Barack Obama, CBS' Katie Couric called him on some of the more unusual proposals:
- $6.2 billion for home weatherization
- $50 million for port modernization and water and wastewater infrastructure needs in Guam
-$100 million for children to learn green construction
Obama defended the weatherization spending by emphasizing the long-term effects:
"We're going to weatherize homes, that immediately puts people back to work and we're going to train people who are out of work, including young people, to do the weatherization. As a consequence of weatherization, our energy bills go down and we reduce our dependence on foreign oil. What would be a more effective stimulus package than that?"
Fair enough. But what about the $800 million for Amtrak? Or the $150 million for the Smithsonian Institute? And there's more: So much more, in fact, that the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has set up a website (http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1873901,00.html) that allows users to comb through the more than 900-page-long bill. You decide: Economic stimulus or wasteful spending?
- $198 million for U.S. military benefits for Filipinos who fought for the U.S. during WWII
- $75 million for "smoking cessation activities"
- $87 million for the "design of a new polar icebreaker"
- $335 million for HIV/STD screening
- $600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees
All projects worthy of money, to be sure, but are they worthy of being part of an economic stimulus plan that's now expected to cost U.S. taxpayers $900 billion?
However, both sides have signaled a willingness to concede. In an interview with CNN, Obama said he would consider cutting items that "may not really stimulate the economy right now." And in the spirit of bipartisanship, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) are working together to compile a list of recommended cuts, with a goal of reducing the bill by $200 billion.
But as the economy continues to shrink and layoffs pile up by the tens of thousands, the nation may not have the patience for cross-party squabbling and finger-pointing. At the White House today, Obama summed it up:
No plan is perfect, and we should work to make it stronger ... Let's not make the perfect the enemy of the essential. Let's show people all over our country who are looking for leadership in this difficult time that we are equal to the task."
- Lili Ladaga
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Reading the Stimulus
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1873901,00.html
The proposed $825 billion stimulus package currently making its way through Congress will be the most expansive spending plan the government has ever proposed. It's expected to cut taxes, fund everything from highways to college education, extend COBRA health insurance for the unemployed, and...give $150 million to the Smithsonian Institution?
That's what the folks at www.readthestimulus.org found out, anyway. Spearheaded by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, www.readthestimulus.org allows anyone to read a searchable PDF version of the House of Representatives' stimulus bill (when the Senate version is released, it will also go on the website). But the bill is 334 pages long and growing every day — with amendments and changes, the current version is up to 941 pages. Nobody wants to sit down and read nearly a thousand pages of legislation for fun. That's where www.readthestimulus.org gets all Web 2.0 on Congress: it's a forum where anyone who wants to can comb through a few pages of the bill and record their findings in a Google document. Volunteers can do as many or as few pages as they like. "We wanted people to know where their money was going," says Rob Bluey, director of online strategy at Heritage. Bluey says that while the government has made PDF versions of bills available online for a while now, the documents are never searchable and they are hard for regular citizens to digest. "The government wasn't doing it, so we stepped in to fill that void." (Read "How to Spend a Trillion Dollars")
The site has only been live for a week and already its 14 volunteers — some are Heritage employees, others work for nonprofits, and still others are just passionate people with extra time on their hands — have finished their first run through of the bill. While readthestimulus.org enters the second, fact-checking phase, some volunteers have taken on side projects of their own. Kristina Rasmussen, director of government affairs at the National Taxpayers Union, has been cross-referencing the federal agencies mentioned in the bill with U.S. Office of Management and Budget's program assessments and has found a number of programs that are receiving money despite poor performance reviews.
So what's actually in this legislative monstrosity? $800 billion goes a long way, and it seems like everyone is getting something. There's $2 billion for renovating public health care centers, $1 billion for the Head Start program, $800 million for Amtrak, $150 million for the Smithsonian Institution, and — wait a second — $14 million for the Accountability and Transparency Board members' travel expenses? There is also a clause that requires all infrastructure projects to be made with U.S. steel, unless it ends up costing 25% more than foreign materials. "Is that the best deal for American taxpayers?" asks Rasmussen, "making people pay more for these infrastructure projects?"
Whatever your thoughts — maybe using American-made materials will create jobs, or maybe it's just another way for Congress to bring home the pork — readthestimulus.org is pleasantly agenda-free. Users can comment on individual bill pages, and while most commenters swing right (renewable energy investments really get people fired up), the project's goal is to simply get the information out there. "The whole project is frankly in some sense stupid," says Rob Neppell, president of new media development company Kithbridge, who runs the website. "It's stupid because we're doing a lot of reengineering, we're trying to actually extract real information out of the text. It shouldn't require a nonprofit company to do the government's work for them."
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