I’ve gotta put in my 2 Cents on this whole stimulus package. Dubbed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. The whole idea behind this is to get the economy rolling again. Create jobs and get us out of this recession. Its has a price anywhere from 800-900 billion dollars. There was a couple weeks where people were talking 1 trillion. Good lord. Thats a lot of money to be throwing around. Problem is, most of it is just spending. Just a bunch of money being thrown around to please everyones personal agendas and to please lobbyists. What? Wasn’t Obama going to be rid of that? I guess not. Just read about some of the things involved in the plan. The frickin’ thing is over 600 pages and I’m not about to read the whole thing, but I’ve heard some of the ideas from radio, internet, or newspaper. Sounds like a lot of spending. Stupid things like buying government employees hybrid cars.  Money for the filming industry to buy film(Dead serious). Modernizing government buildings and so on. Silly things like this that don’t belong in a “Recovery Act.” Everyone is lobbying to get their piece of the pie. Its not going to stimulate much of anything. Create jobs? Not really. Just more debt for future generations. There are some good things about the plan, just not enough. The cons outweigh the pros big time.  

Look what happened with all that TARP money. It was used to buy up all those bad assets and get banks lending again. Only problem is the banks are just sitting on the money. Or worse, they’ve spent it frivolously. Why? Because there basically were not rules with that money and they don’t want to start lending again. Just a hand out and good luck. Now when they are asked what they did with it, they won’t say. You mean to tell me all that taxpayer money that was given out and nobody put some clauses in that? Now there is talk of being sure to investigate into wether or not the money was used properly. On top of that we find out that they overpaid by $78 Billion dollars? What the hell? Did anyone spend some time on this? Or did they just come up with a nice round number that they thought would be enough. I can envision the conversation Paulson must have had when coming up with this? “What do you think guys? $700 Billion sound good? Lets flip a coin.” Haha, I doubt that, but I’ve heard the number they came up with from that was just thrown out there. No calculating done. What a childish way to spend our tax dollars. They didn’t even spend it all before they left office. Just handed it off to let Obama deal with it. Oh the nonsense that is our government. 

 I’d like to believe that change is coming. Granted, President Obama hasn’t even been in office a month, was voted into a hell of a mess, and years of bad policies. I do believe Obama will end up doing some good and better him than McCain. But it seems to be turing out like the old saying “politics as usual”.