Imagine a high-speed train zooming down hundreds of miles of glistening train track stretching across sunny California, connecting Anaheim to San Francisco. It’s a bullet train dream, and it’s a prime example of President Barack Obama’s latest plan to create jobs in America. The trouble is that this dream is far from reality. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that the California high-speed train–which is funded in part by $3 billion in federal grants from President Obama’s stimulus–is now expected to cost $98 billion, twice what was expected, and will …
On February 11th, President Barack Obama stood on a windy hilltop in front of a dusty construction site in Fairfax County, Virginia, and promised the American people: “Here in Virginia, my plan will create or save almost 100,000 jobs, doing work at sites just like this one.” Standing alongside current Democratic National Committee Chairman and former-Gov. Tim Kaine, the President continued: “Where we’re standing, that could mean hundreds of construction jobs. And the benefits of jobs we create directly will multiply across the economy.” Eleven months later, none of those …
The AP reports: Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found. … Construction spending would be a key part of the Jobs for Main Street Act, a $75 billion second stimulus to revive the nation’s lethargic unemployment rate and improve the dismal job market for construction workers. The House approved the bill 217-212 last month after House Speaker Nancy …
George Will writes today: The administration insists that it really does have a single priority: Everything depends on fixing the economy. But it also says that everything depends on everything: Economic revival requires enactment of the entire liberal wish list of recent decades. The implausibility of this opportunistic hypothesis is deepened by Obama’s rhetoric, which says “catastrophe” impends unless everything is done simultaneously. But his budget, in effect, says the danger will soon be gone and the new risk will be whiplash from the economy’s sudden acceleration. Although only a …
Barack Obama is trying to convince the American people that when it comes to his economic stimulus plan, “We’re guided by what works, not by any ideology or special interests.” But as the New York Times reports today, nobody has any idea “what works.” First the Times reports: Nearly every economist who spoke here agreed that a dollar invested in, say, a new transit system or in bridge repair is spent and respent more efficiently than a dollar that comes to a household in a tax cut. Awesome. That’s good …
Government spending does not create economic growth. Regrettably, many in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, have ignored this fact. Just today, Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), declared in his Wall Street Journal op-ed How to Make Sure the Stimulus Works that, “it is fairly obvious that serious deficit spending is needed immediately.” While his four rules for an effective stimulus bill are generally correct, government spending does not lead to economic growth. This notion is grounded in the outdated and often disproved Keynesian economic theory that more government spending invariably increases …
During yesterday’s House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Rep. John Mica (R-FL) claimed: “Every billion dollars in spending on infrastructure, on highway and transportation expenditures does result in 35,000 new jobs.” Too bad Mica wasn’t listening to the Ways and Means Hearing across the hall where economist Alan Viard told the committee: “Changes in infrastructure spending are not an effective method of creating jobs or providing short-run fiscal stimulus to the economy.” The Washington Post further reports: “Viard is a former Bush administration economist now at the American Enterprise Institute. But …
Earlier this year the left in Congress and the White house pushed through a $152 billion economic stimulus package that they assured us what keep the economy out of recession. It didn’t work. In late July, when the White House sought the power to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the left insisted on $5 billion in new spending for a ‘affordable housing trust fund‘ to help stabilize housing prices. That didn’t work. Just last month, the White House and Congress pushed through a $700 billion bailout of Wall …
For most Americans, there are 100 shopping days left until Christmas. But for the special interests in Washington, there are only 10 shopping days left with Congress tentatively set to adjourn for the year on Sept. 26. One would hope the financial turmoil on Wall Street would give legislators pause to revisit past mistakes. No such luck. Even though the last $170 billion stimulus did nothing to help the economy, liberals in Congress are now pushing for upward of $75 billion in new deficit spending. The left has been preparing …
The above sentence is an actual headline from the Idaho Mountain Express. Translated from lawyer to English it reads: Department of Energy to do National Environmental Policy Act environmental impact statement on British Nuclear Fuels Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project at Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory after Society for Risk Analysis protest.” What the sentence means, is that are nation’s environmental laws have an absolute stranglehold on the energy sector of our economy. Many progressives, like Open Left‘s Matt Stoller, often argue that had we not invaded Iraq, we …
