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The final price tag on the stimulus bill is either $787 billion or $9.7 trillion, depending on how one defines words like "final" and "stimulus" and whether you are getting your news from a liberal or conservative news source. If you want your news straight ... well, so do I. (But then I'd know how large the stimulus bill actually is.)
The fact is that there are as many possible definitions as there are people to define them. President Obama redefined "earmark" so that it meant anything added after the fact, not pork tacked on from the beginning in order to buy congressional votes.
Thus, $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts qualifies as emergency stimulus spending, not pork. The 4 BILLION (with a "b") for ACORN isn't really a political payoff. It's necessary emergency spending to stave off economic "catastrophe." Without ACORN, how could the economy survive?
It is easily the most massive fraud in history, and it is being perpetrated with barely a peep of public opposition. In the first place, nobody understands the amounts of money involved.
Even at $787 billion, what does that mean? A billion seconds ago, Jimmy Carter was president of the U.S. A billion minutes ago, Herod was king of Judea.
I've read all kinds of calculations regarding what the final price tag is to cost each individual American, but again, it depends on some sliding scale of definitions too esoteric for ordinary humans to understand.
Somewhere between $1,600 for every man woman and child on earth (on the low end of the scale) to pretty much whatever number one wants to create – using an equally esoteric sliding scale for decimal points.
Let's just say that it's more than breathtaking. (To pay for it, don't be surprised to hear plans for breath-taxing.)
There has never been a spending plan this large in the history of man. To pull it off, all pretense at keeping previous international trade and currency agreements has been completely abandoned. The "Buy American" clause stands in naked violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The printing of money to subsidize an economic downturn is a violation of a number of international currency agreements in force since Nixon removed U.S. currency from the gold standard.
The other day, Sen. Chuck Schumer defended a planned $1.2 trillion expenditure by the Federal Reserve by shrugging, "It's not taxpayer money." He didn't mean to, but Schumer let slip the big secret that only Americans are ignorant of.
It isn't taxpayer money; it's pretend money. It doesn't exist until it is printed.
The only reason the extra $1.2 trillion isn't counterfeit is because the Fed is authorized to print it, but it will accomplish the same thing. Doubling the amount of currency in circulation has the effect of halving the purchasing weight of the currency already in circulation.
Gerald Celente summed it up well on Glenn Beck's program the other day: "This isn't Economics 101. It's not even Economics for Dummies!"
According to the latest economic information, the stock market is down a whopping 2,000 points since Election Day. (It makes you wonder what investors know that the rest of us don't.)
And the economic stimulus bill gives a tax cut that amounts, on average, to about $13 more per week in your after-tax paycheck, or about $2.60 per day. (Never mind. Now we all know.)
Almost a trillion dollars in new spending and tax cuts – for a wage benefit for the average worker of about $2.60 per day. Well, America voted for change. And America got it.
Almost enough change to pay for one coffee break.
Tax cuts that would have genuinely benefited the economy – like a tax break for buying a U.S. made car or a tax credit for buying a new home – were dropped.
Provisions that would spend tens of millions to help people quit smoking or $50 million for energy upgrades for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Cemeteries Division remain intact.
Also intact is $8 billion (with a "b") for high-speed rail service from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Nothing like investing $8 billion to bail out suffering casinos as an economic stimulus.
These numbers aren't merely unsustainable; they are unimaginable. It is almost as if there were a deliberate decision undertaken to "fix" the economy by spending it out of existence, forcing the creation of a new economic system in its place and ... hey, wait a minute!
Naw. Nobody is that diabolical. But still ...
