…so that we can load it up with the most useless projects we can devise…but we’ll call them “Infrastructure,” and taxpayers will look the other way.
From a couple posts ago…
“We understand that we’ve got to provide a blood infusion to the patient right now to make sure that the patient is stabilized. And that means that we can’t worry short term about the deficit. We’ve got to make sure that the economic stimulus plan is large enough to get the economy moving,” he said.
Let’s dissect what Mr. Jimmy just said. We have to make sure to print and/or borrow so much money that the economy will have to get better?
Obama’s words rang out like a dog whistle for liberals everywhere.
And not surprisingly, the term “Infrastructure” gained a new, broader meaning.
On Monday, the U.S. Conference of Mayors went to Capitol Hill to ask for a handout, or as they put it: “We are reporting that in 427 cities of all sizes in all regions of the country, a total of 11,391 infrastructure projects (emphasis mine-JR) are ‘ready to go.’ These projects represent an infrastructure investment of $73,163,299,303 that would be capable of producing an estimated 847,641 jobs in 2009 and 2010.”
…it turns out $73 Billion is “capable” of producing 847,641 temporary jobs.
A wish list that is 11,391 projects strong! What vital infrastructure projects would cash-strapped taxpayers get for their $73 billion? Here’s a sampling:
– Hercules, Calif., wants $2.5 million in hard-earned taxpayer money for a “Waterfront Duck Pond Park,” and another $200,000 for a dog park.
– Euless, Texas, wants $15 million for the Midway Park Family Life Center, which, you’ll be glad to note, includes both a senior center and aquatic facility.
– Natchez, Miss., “needs” a new $9.5 million sports complex “which would allow our city to host major regional and national sports tournaments.”
– Henderson, Nev., is asking for $20 million to help “develop a 60 acre multi-use sports field complex.”
– Brigham City, Utah, wants $15 million for a sports park.
– Arlington, Texas, needs $4 million to expand its tennis center.
It’s a simple fact. Liberals can not be trusted with the nation’s checkbook. In a time of world financial crisis, their solution is to spend more taxpayer money on even more useless pork.
The government does have a role to play: stimulate the economy by creating incentives for growth, incentives that will be permanent, paid for by cutting government down to size. But liberals would entertain that notion. Liberals seek to justify and extend government largess, not reduce it to it’s rightful weight.
Instead of stimulating the economy, Barack Obama and his faithful liberal lunatics in Congress aspire to become the economy.
Friggin Keynesian socialist redistributionists.
Starve the beast! That’s how we get money moving.
/jc
Keynesian Econommics.
Short term deficit spending, combined with long term budget balancing. Or so it was presented, back in the day when I had macro economics from Walter Heller at the U of MN.
Seems to me that under republican presidency combined with republican domination of house and senate we had a large growth in government spending. The largest growth of its kind.
There is nothing about the current proposals that make them specific to liberals or democrats. It seems to me, from a relatively independent perspective, that this kind of government spending is common to politicians from both sides of the political spectrum, and pretty evenly so.
If we do have spending on necessary – the key word, necessary – infrastructure, we have an improvement that benefits everyone, long term. We could use improvements to things like bridges, so that no one else has to experience bridges falling down. We could use improvement to highways. Schools. Our rail system. We haven’t had anything like the investment in those things that we had back in the 50s and 60s. It’s about time we did.
Does that mean every proposal under the banner of infrastructure is a good one? Of course not. But it does not automatically make all investment in infrastructure bad either.
Something along this line of investment in public property should help the economy and create jobs over the next couple of years, but like anything else the devil is in the details. I think criticism should wait to see what is actually funded.
Slash Says:
December 10th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Friggin Keynesian socialist redistributionists.
Starve the beast! That’s how we get money moving.
/jc
“Starving the Beast” didn’t seem very effective in the 1930s, although plenty of people WERE starving. Keynesian economics has proven effective not only here but in other parts of the world in ending economic recessions.
As to “socialist redistribution”, there has been a greater loss of wealth in the middle class, and a greater increase in the concentration of wealth in a very small upper class in the past decade than in any previous recent period, and it doesn’t appear to be from any particular merit among those few increasing in affluence.
So I would respectfully suggest that looking at wealth redistribution BACK to the greater number of people who work for a living is not necessarily socialist, but about inequities that should be addressed.
This country was a lot stronger when more wealth was in the hands of middle class people, and it is essential in a consumer driven economy like ours that we return to that status.
Let me step through this blog’s “Fourth Wall” for a moment to explain a couple of things, both to new readers and to some of the longer-termed members of my audience.
Not all is as it seems. Hold that little aphorism in mind.
A brief note about the dramatis persona of this blog.
Angryclown, as has been noted in the past, is an old friend of mine. He exists to yank chains – indeed, given a choice between a pointed argument and gleeful chain-yanking, he’ll yank. As it were. Think of him as the Jon Stewart of this blog, if Jon Stewart were less affected with gravitas.
Slash is someone I’ve actually known rather longer – and I met him through the same auspices as Mr. Clown. If Clown is Jon Stewart, Slash (at least on this blog, as well as on another project on which he and I worked, probably seven years ago) was more the Stephen Colbert; if he sounds like a libertarian constructionist, it’s purely for comedic effect. He is, politically and culturally, a male Barbra Streisand. He’s also an amazingly funny guy; more impressively, he is that funny on a “production” basis, Colbert impersonation notwithstanding (as is the Clown, and no, I really can’t give details).
Penigma, aka Peevish, Mikey, JBaueer, Molly and PB, is someone with whom a) I shared a mutual hobby (via which I met him, over 20 years ago) and b) I worked on two different occasions; indeed, I’ve actually met him many more times than I have met my own associate editor JRoosh. As much as we go around and around, and as utterly wrong as he is on most things political, he’s a genuinely good person; he’s also highly qualified at his current trade (about which I’ll say naught), and if asked (which will never happen), I’d recommend your company hire him (for that role, as opposed to, say, political analyst) without reservation.
Dog Gone is someone I know via the same mutual hobby as Peev. Indeed, Peev and Dog Gone have met on more than one occasion (but don’t ask; I don’t violate confidences).
So, DG – don’t take Slash TOO seriously. Save the energy for arguing with this forum’s list of genuine paleocons and Shi’a Libertarians.
“he is that funny on a “production” basis,”
Must be physical comedy, or the use of props or funny noises perhaps. Something that doesn’t translate at all to comment sections of blogs.
Mitch, as always you are very gracious.
The rest of you, by contrast, are vicious little punks.
angryclown said:
“The rest of you, by contrast, are vicious little punks”
And you, angryclown, are more gracious that usual. 🙂
Mitch can you start putting AC’s comments in your moderation queue for a day before you publish them? And then publish them on random SITD posts? It would yank his chain and no one else would notice anything unusual.
And why is there no explanation of Swiftee’s online persona?
I resent being called a “vicious little punk”. I can be every bit as gracious as Mr. Berg, and as to sarcastic repartee, I bow to no clown. Come to think of it, I bow to no clown under any circumstances. Particularly when the clown is standing behind me. Or inviting me to sniff the flower in his lapel. Or talking to me from the driver’s seat of his little clown car. Or…
If Penigma goes back the two decades we’ve known each other Mitch, my persona name here probably gave away my identity already, LOL.
Thanks for the wise words Mitch, but I’m not all that worried about being too serious here either.
I am bored with “slogan think”, and the notion that any idealogy confers some kind of infallibility in matters social, economic or political. The steady pressure to polarizing ideas embraced by the respective sides of the so-called culture wars is numbingly simplistic.
At least Slash manages to be entertainly polysyllabic. Try saying “Keynesian socialist redistributionists” three time fast…
Dog Gone said:
“We could use improvements to things like bridges, so that no one else has to experience bridges falling down”
Yes, but what kind of “improvements” are you talking about? Do you want “super bridges” built from here on out?
“We could use improvement to highways”
Yes, but what kind of “improvements” are you talking about? Do you want more lanes in every highway, or more roads?
“Schools”
Yes, but what kind of “improvements” are you talking about? Do you want more money, more testing, smaller class sizes, vouchers, or all of the above?
“Our rail system”
I’m not so sure. What benefit do we get out of an investment in rail, compared to an investment in roads and bridges? Seems a waste to exert a effort to revive such an inflexible beast.
Rail has advantages, but no one who seems interested in rail also seems interested in using rail where it is most advantageous: they want to move people, not really heavy items with a reasonably static start and destination points. *shrug*
Troy, you will better understand the efficiency of rail vs road when we are all ordered from our homes and sent out to build ‘Obamavilles’ in the countryside.
When you reach your destination you build your barracks out of the train. After that you won’t be allowed to go anywhere.
Haven’t you ever seen ‘Dr. Zhivago’?
Angryclown, as has been noted in the past, is an old friend of mine. He exists to yank chains – indeed, given a choice between a pointed argument and gleeful chain-yanking, he’ll yank.
I don’t think that there is any evidence that AC has ever made a ‘pointed argument’. If pressed he’ll sometimes come up with some Marxist clap-trap, like “Social progress is achieved when thesis is countered by anti-thesis and creates synthesis. This confirms Hegel’s historicism”. When it is pointed out to him that this is, indeed, Marxist clap-trap, he will respond with something like “Oh yeah? Your sister has a skateboard with a kick stand” or some other attempt at a cliche that becomes a verbal fumble.
If we had more trains, then Obama could get them to run on time.
yanking chains is sooo much easier than forming rational intelligent thoughts anyway.
Terry,
You give AC too much credit. You know your comment just sent him off to find the Wiki on Hegel.
People,
people who need bailouts
are the LUUUUCKIEST PEEEEOPLE
in the world.
Mitch doesn’t give me flowers, anymore.
/jc
Terry illustrates why Angryclown prefers mockery to argument on SitD. You far-right wingnuts make up your own facts. Terry, please provide a link to any argument by Angryclown that could fairly be characterized as the sort of “Marxist claptrap” as fabricated above.
That, or shut your piehole. Either’s fine with Angryclown.
Terry illustrates why Angryclown prefers mockery to argument on SitD.
AC, you sure that it has nothing to do with your capacity to wage one over the other?
PS Mmmmmm. Pie.
I’ve enjoyed the read; but going back to the original post I’d say it’s still (in my view) friv
It is true, JRoosh. Angryclown’s skill at mockery, jests and japes knows no equal.
Scott…you okay? We lost you there.
Someone call 911
It is true, JRoosh. Angryclown’s skill at mockery, jests and japes knows no equal.
I had to look up japes
You far-right wingnuts make up your own facts.
If plagiarizing & projecting make you a master, well then I guess I’ll give you your due…
Clown, trying to find one of your arguments where you actually made an argument is a daunting task. Example: On June 5, 2006, Mitch published a post about a gun range that had burned down. You wrote a lot of comments. Here they are:
Joel Rosenberg(GunNut) reported: “Approximately 40 shooters for the match were turned away at the gate. Some of the shooters were from out of state. More shooters were notified by cell phone if possible as they traveled to the match.”
Please, no more! Angryclown is near tears already. You mean a bunch of gun nuts didn’t get to shoot at stuff?
So go out in the woods and set up a bunch of empty beer cans on a log. Buncha whiners.
———-
Nope! Never have, never will.
———
Gee, Scary Colleen, don’t you think you kinda blew your credibility ’round these parts back when you were calling people “porch monkeys”?
———
You’re right, Kerm. Scary Colleen merely jumped in to *defend* calling people porch monkeys.
———
Attention right-wing idiots: nowhere did Angryclown defend arson or vandalism. If shooting firearms with a bunch of your fellow gun-nuts gives you a stiffie, by all means go to it. Angryclown simply wishes you people would stop whining about every little thing.
———
OK, buzzkill, go back and read it again. Move your lips more slowly this time so maybe it’ll sink in. Angryclown did not support arson or vandalism. Yet Angryclown did not get all boohoo over a bunch of you gun-nuts getting inconvenienced.
Seems like Mitch has already tried and convicted the political left for the crime. I’d imagine a smart investigator would also take a look at the amount of insurance the owner has on the property.
———
Marge Gunderson will figure it out.
———
Well, buzzkill, after explaining it to you twice, it’s clear that you are even stupider than I’d thought. Do yourself a favor and don’t operate any heavy machinery, ‘kay?
“no real empathy towards the victims of this crime”
Oh, boohoo. All of a sudden Angryclown has to have “empathy” for you wingnut “victims.” Angryclown fondly remembers a time when he could at least respect conservatives for not being big pansies. No longer.
There’s nothing in there like an argument at all, although you refer to yourself in the 3rd person quite a bit (what’s it like in that hall of mirrors?) and you use the racial slur ‘porch monkeys’ twice.
you use the racial slur ‘porch monkeys’ twice.
But he’s a leftist, so his heart is in the right place…
Clown often says he’ll “explain” or “argue” a point, but merely says what amounts to “you’re wrong” in Clown-speak (which includes copious use of words refering to the buttocks, the penis, and his vaginal cavity).
Troy writes
“Yes, but what kind of “improvements” are you talking about? Do you want “super bridges” built from here on out?”
– Bridge maintenance that has been too long deferred in many cases. Assessments publicized at the time of our bridge tragedy indicated that nationwide a large percentage of our bridges are in bad shape. I am not clear on how you would define super bridges. I’d be thrilled with a combination of safe and adequate – and necessary (as contrasted with bridges to nowhere).
and
“We what kind of “improvements” are you talking about? Do you want more lanes in every highway, or more roads?”
Expansion where needed, more roads only where necessary (no roads to bridges to nowhere). Repair of potholes and other wear and tear. Altering roads which have proven dangerous as indicated by accident studies to safer versions.
and
“what kind of “improvements” are you talking about? Do you want more money, more testing, smaller class sizes, vouchers, or all of the above?”
Actually, I was thinking more of the physical plants of schools. There are a lot of states where problems exist with inadequate wiring, asbestos and insulation deficiencies, are in need of updating heating plants and lighting.
and
“What benefit do we get out of an investment in rail, compared to an investment in roads and bridges? Seems a waste to exert a effort to revive such an inflexible beast.
Rail has advantages, but no one who seems interested in rail also seems interested in using rail where it is most advantageous: they want to move people, not really heavy items with a reasonably static start and destination points. *shrug* ”
I’d like to see the maintenance of our existing freight rail system; much of it is deteriorating, and it is still a useful and significant part of our national transportation system. I am also a big fan of the use of light rail for moving people as a practical and cost effective form of mass transit. Amtrak is an underappreciated mode of travel; it is a very pleasant way to travel.