According to Matthew Vadum of the Capitol Research Center, the stimulus package now under consideration includes:
Regarding the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, Vadum writes in American Spectator: “Although ACORN operatives usually get their hands on such funds only after they have first passed through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or state and local governments, the new spending bill largely eliminates these dawdling middle men, making it easier to get Uncle Sam's largess directly into the hands of the same people who run ACORN's various vote fraud and extortion rackets. And the legislative package provides these funds without the usual prohibition on using government money for lobbying or political activities.” The charges of partisan political payback appear to be resonating in part due to Obama’s longstanding association with partisan get-out-the-vote operations. He was endorsed by ACORN, and during the campaign paid an ACORN affiliate $832,600 to get-out-the-vote assistance. Early in his career, he led a voter drive for an ACORN-affiliated group called Project Vote. It’s not the first time ACORN has been entangled in a bailout controversy. In September, House Republicans objected that the original $700 billion bailout package included $100 million for ACORN – a tiny fraction of the sums for ACORN now being considered in the stimulus package |
Top 20 Fast Facts About the House Democrats' Trillion Dollar Spending Plan
House Democrats Derail Bipartisan Process, Plow Ahead with Proposals to Fund Digital TV Coupons, Cars for Bureaucrats, and Contraceptives ... In a Bill Allegedly About the Economy
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Washington, Jan 26 - Earlier this month, when then-President-elect Obama met with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, he laid out a vision of crafting a bipartisan economic recovery package focused on creating jobs and fast-acting tax relief. However, in the weeks since that meeting, Democratic leaders in Congress have taken that vision and turned it upside down, crafting a plan loaded with hundreds of billions in spending on programs and projects – most of which will not impact our ailing economy for many years, if ever, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Rather than working with Republicans on a proposal that lets families, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and the self-employed keep more of what they earn to create jobs and help fix our economy, it seems congressional Democrats are prepared to barrel ahead with the same-old, same-old – more and more aimless spending – at a time when the American people expect so much more out of their elected officials in Washington. For a taste of just how badly Capitol Hill Democrats have strayed from the vision of a bipartisan plan to get our economy moving again, take a look at these 20 fast facts about their bloated plan:
1. The $825 billion package slated for a House vote later this week will exceed more than $1.1 trillion when adding in the interest ($300 plus billion) between 2009-2019 to pay for it.
2. The Capitol Hill Democrats’ plan includes funding for contraceptives; regardless of where anyone stands on taxpayer funded contraception, there is no question that it has NOTHING to do with the economy.
3. The legislation could open billions of taxpayer dollars to left-wing groups like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which has been accused of voter fraud, is reportedly under federal investigation; and played a key role in the housing meltdown.
4. Here are just a few of the programs and projects that have been included in the House Democrats’ proposal:
· $650 million for digital TV coupons.
· $600 million for new cars for the federal government.
· $6 billion for colleges/universities – many which have billion dollar endowments.
· $50 million in funding for the National Endowment of the Arts.
· $44 million for repairs to U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters.
· $200 million for the National Mall, including $21 million for sod.
5. The plan establishes at least 32 new government programs at a cost of over $136 billion. That means more than a third of this plan’s spending provisions are dedicated to creating new government programs.
6. The plan provides spending in at least 150 different federal programs, ranging from Amtrak to the Transportation Security Administration. Is this the “targeted” plan Democratic leaders promised?
7. Even though the legislation contains at least 152 separate spending proposals, the authors of the plan can only say that 34 have any chance at keeping or growing jobs.
8. Just one in seven dollars of an $18.5 billion expenditure on “energy efficiency” and “renewable energy programs” would be spent within the next 18 months.
9. The total cost of this one piece of legislation is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire federal government.
10. The House Democrats’ bill will cost each and every household $6,700 in additional debt, paid for by our children and grandchildren.
11. The bill provides enough spending – $825 billion – to give every man, woman, and child in America $2,700. $825 billion is enough to give every person in Ohio $72,000.
12. $825 billion is enough to give every person living in poverty in the United States $22,000.
13. Although the House Democrats’ proposal has been billed as a transportation and infrastructure investment package, in actuality only $30 billion of the bill – or three percent – is for road and highway spending. A recent study from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that only 25 percent of infrastructure dollars can be spent in the first year, making the one year total less than $7 billion.
14. Much of the funding within the House Democrats’ proposal will go to programs that already have large, unexpended balances. For example, the bill provides $1 billion for Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) – a program that already has $16 billion on hand. States also are sitting on some $9 billion in unused highway funds – funds that Congress is prepared to rescind later this year.
15. All board members of the “Accountability and Transparency Board” created by this legislation are appointees of the President; none will be appointed by Congress.
16. A scant 2.7 percent, or $22.3 billion of the overall package, is dedicated to small business tax relief.
17. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the legislation increases by seven million the number of people who get a check back from the IRS that exceeds what they paid in payroll and income taxes.
18. The “Making Work Pay” tax credit at the center of the plan amounts to $1.37 a day, or about the price of a cup of coffee.
19. Almost one-third of the so-called “tax relief” in the House Democrats’ bill is spending in disguise, meaning that true tax relief makes up only 24 percent of the total package – not the 40 percent that President Obama had requested.
20. $825 billion is just the beginning – many Capitol Hill Democrats want to spend even more taxpayer dollars on their “stimulus” plan. In fact, the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. David Obey (D-WI), told Roll Call earlier this month, “I would not be surprised to see us go further on some of these programs down the line.”
http://republicanleader.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=109402
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GOP, Dems gamble on effect of a stimulus bill
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
(01-27) 04:00 PDT Washington -- Behind the $825 billion poker game playing out in Washington this week is a tacit understanding on both sides: Republicans know Congress must act to address the sinking economy, and President Obama and Democrats know what they are doing had better work or they're in trouble a year from now. The giant stimulus package is easily the largest such effort ever in the United States. As the first big policy battle of Obama's presidency, the legislation will set the political tone of his administration and serve as a benchmark for its success. Obama's efforts to reach out to the opposition party are unlike anything witnessed in the last administration or even those before it. He is trekking to Capitol Hill again today for Republican-only meetings in the House and Senate. He has already incorporated large tax cuts in the stimulus to lure GOP support. Obama is looking for two things: at least partial Republican ownership of a risky, costly policy experiment, and avoidance of the kind of partisan rupture that nearly killed a much smaller and less critical effort by President Bill Clinton in 1993. "We don't have any pride of ownership," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. Republicans face risks of their own. While attacking what they call pork and overspending, they do not want responsibility for killing what is now the government's last, best hope to reverse or at least slow an alarming worldwide economic decline. The Federal Reserve already has slashed interest rates to near zero and flooded credit markets with cash and loan backstops, throwing out the rules in the most muscular intervention ever attempted. Monetary policy has reached its limit, leaving old-fashioned Keynesian fiscal policy as the last best hope. "I worry this is the beginning of the most severe downturn of postwar economic history," compounded by the contraction in demand across the globe, said Brad Setser, a macroeconomist at the Council on Foreign Relations. "There is no choice other than trying to counteract a very sharp contraction in private activity" through government spending, he said. If Republicans blocked the stimulus, they would risk even more blame for the economic wreckage many tie to the Bush administration. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has struck a much more accommodating tone than has House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio. Democrats have plenty of votes to pass the Obama plan on their own in the House; Republicans theoretically could block the bill in the Senate, but are unlikely to do so. A bipartisan vote for the Obama stimulus would "set the tone for the next 10 bills," said Princeton University political scientist Julin Zelizer. "If he gets a straight party-line vote, it's likely that the rest of his legislation is going to be treated in a much more partisan fashion." Two Senate committees are set to take up the stimulus today. The House has scheduled a full vote Wednesday. A House Democratic leadership aide said he believes Republican leaders will make their points and then "let their members go and vote. I just can't see them voting no at a time like this. This is not like 1993." A Virginia advocacy group called Americans for Limited Government is pressuring moderate Democrats to vote against the stimulus bill, listing $4.19 billion that it said would go to the liberal housing activist group ACORN, $200 million for beautification of the National Mall and other items. Yet spokesman Carter Clew laughed at the idea that Republicans would kill the whole bill. "We're not quite that ambitious," he said. "The idea is just to limit it some." Republicans object less to the stimulus itself than to its spending component; they have no objection to cutting taxes. The problem with tax cuts when consumer and business confidence is so low, however, is that households save most of the money, said Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan administration Treasury official. Past tax rebates, including the up to $600 checks sent out last year by the Bush administration, were mostly saved or used to pay down debt, affirming the theory of the late conservative economist Milton Friedman, who first pointed out that people do not alter their spending permanently in response to temporary changes in their income. That's why the Obama administration chose to adjust withholding tables to reflect a $500 tax credit instead, hoping workers would spend more if they saw larger weekly paychecks. The administration also focused most of its attention on direct government spending to assure that the money is actually used. Yet it is surprisingly difficult to get an immediate spending boost even with so-called shovel-ready projects. "Contrary to popular belief, there are very few projects sitting there waiting to break ground tomorrow the minute the check arrives," said Bartlett. Spending over and above what would have taken place anyway by consumers, businesses and governments, he said, "very, very hard. No one's yet figured it out." The Congressional Budget Office said Monday that roughly two thirds of the $825 billion would be spent in the next 18 months. The Tax Policy Center, a joint effort of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, issued a report Monday that gives many of the tax cuts poor grades. The education tax credit for low-income families will be slow to start, it predicted, and the tax credit for first-time home buyers may give large windfalls to people who were already planning to buy. The business tax breaks fared even worse. Much of the stimulus is flying on a wing and a prayer. "There's a lack of precedent to predict how effective some of these actions will be," said Jonathan Neuberger, a former San Francisco Federal Reserve economist, now a principal at the consulting firm Economists Inc. "All you have to do is to have watched (former Treasury Secretary) Henry Paulson over the last three or four months. The truth is policymakers have no bloody idea, or they have lots of ideas but no proof that anything in particular works. You try one thing; if that doesn't work, you try another." Even a large, well-designed jolt by the government, however, may not halt the economy's powerful downward momentum. "Given the magnitude of the shocks and the depth of our current problems - private sector balance sheets are in terrible shape, and the banking system obviously is in very difficult circumstances - it will take a long time before the damage can be undone," Setser said. Business groups and Republicans are lobbying ferociously for more tax breaks in the $825 billion Obama stimulus, which already is about 40 percent tax cuts. But one business tax break not in the bill so far that is attracting particular attention from Silicon Valley comes from an unlikely source: liberal California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. Boxer co-authored a 2004 tax holiday for corporations that returned overseas earnings to the United States, where they were taxed at a lower rate for one year. The Internal Revenue Service reported that 843 corporations used the provision, repatriating $362 billion. Technology companies are pushing the idea as a cost-free way to boost the economy, arguing that if the money stays overseas, the government collects no taxes and loses the investment. Boxer is working with Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign to add the break to the stimulus. E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/27/MN9O15H6BT.DTL&type=printable =============================================Silicon Valley backs Boxer tax-cut plan
Obama and Acorn
Community organizers, phony voters, and your tax dollars.
At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America's Founders had been "community organizers" -- like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren't like that any more. Mr. Obama's kind of organizers work at Acorn, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country.Acorn -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. We've written about them for years, but Acorn is now getting more attention as John McCain's campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and Acorn's ties to Mr. Obama. It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government.
Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage," for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting "strikes" against banks so they'd lower credit standards.
But the organization's real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.
All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.
The Michigan Secretary of State told the press in September that Acorn had submitted "a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications." Earlier this month, Nevada's Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller requested a raid on Acorn's offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). Nevada's Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications Acorn submitted weekly.
Officials in Ohio are investigating voter fraud connected with Acorn, and Florida's Seminole County is withholding Acorn registrations that appear fraudulent. New Mexico, North Carolina and Missouri are looking into hundreds of dubious Acorn registrations. Wisconsin is investigating Acorn employees for, according to an election official, "making people up or registering people that were still in prison."
Then there's Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20% of Acorn's registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn.
That's just this year. In 2004, four Acorn employees were indicted in Ohio for submitting false voter registrations. In 2005, two Colorado Acorn workers were found to have submitted false registrations. Four Acorn Missouri employees were indicted in 2006; five were found guilty in Washington state in 2007 for filling out registration forms with names from a phone book.
Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago "community organizer" at Acorn's side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn's leaders for being "smack dab in the middle" of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.
During his tenure on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for "staging, sound, lighting." It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.
The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it's disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you're shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he's on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.
The Justice Department needs to treat these fraud reports as something larger than a few local violators. The question is whether Acorn is systematically subverting U.S. election law -- on the taxpayer's dime.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122394051071230749.html
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