President Obama’s jobs bill is finally available, you can read it here. See what nuggets you can find in its 155 pages.
The high-speed rail boondoggle costs $4 billion, and is on page 29. Take a look at how California’s high-speed rail project is going: It’s hideously wasteful and expensive, even according to liberal Kevin Drum. Obama’s $4 billion adds to the billions the federal government has already spent, and is in the end just a drop in the lake of spending that high-speed rail will be.
The American Infrastructure Financing Authority, aka the “infrastructure bank,” is set up on page 40. That multi-billion dollar entity amounts to a union jobs slush fund as long as any Democrat controls appointments to the board. Think NLRB plus walking around money, courtesy the American taxpayer.
And despite the scandalous green failure that Solyndra has become, the Barack Obama’s Job Act continues the trend of spending billions on sundry green initiatives. The AJA text is peppered with references to “green building codes,” “green projects,” “green roofs” and the like. To the tune of about $25 billion.
All paid for, according to OMB Director Jack Lew, not by cutting any spending elsewhere but by raising taxes on job creators. In the American Jobs Act, President Obama has attempted to set up a “heads I win, tails you lose” scenario with the Republicans. Pass it and his pet projects and favored unions get payoffs while the rich get soaked. Don’t pass it, and he’ll use that to run against a do-nothing Congress.
Unfortunately for him, he is nowhere near popular enough to pull that off. His speech last week kicking off the sales pitch for the AJA resulted in him losing ground in the polls.
He told us that he wanted to spread the wealth and he is doing it, the sad part is 42% still like that idea.
It is always a good idea when it is other people’s money. Most still have not realized that federal moneys, grudgiungly and inefficiently doled out to local communities, actually come from real people. People who hire and people who save. People who live next door. Parents of college students, who no longer can extend their personal credit to support their students. It’s an eye opener for young college students who are forced to work for the first time in their lavishly supported lives. But we are certainly getting an eyeful of how the limosine liberal set live, and it ain’t pretty.
I spent about an hour and a half skimming the fool thing and, without a side-by-side comparison with the multitude of existing laws referenced and changed, was unable to make head or tail of it beyond that it would vest tremendous discretionary power in various administrative agencies. Here is a part, early on in the text, that is amusing for that reason:
Similar delegations to various agencies are quite common throughout the bill; they are just less comprehensible.
At the very least, congressional staff with expertise in the various area covered need to analyze every detail; that alone will be sufficient to keep the bill from being passed “now” and that alone will reduce the likely of it being passed so that we can see what’s in it.
Everything that runs on tracks which carries people are boondoggles since world war II ended, when Automobile, Interstates, was built in America and Airlines and Greyhound bus was in busines, thats when every passenger railroad been a boondoggle. with Interstates, Automobiles and Greyhound buses replaced all passenger railroad, allong with airliners.
Call California Governor Jerry Brown at (916) 445-2841 and Calfiornia Tresurer Bill Lockyer at (916) 653-2995 to demand that they end the boondoggle now, and Lockyer not sell bonds for this project. Leave a message if you can’t get through. If people keep calling, they’ll start to understand that California requires spending on real priorities, like education, senior centers, parks, social services, water, bridges, roads, but not a useless train. Someone far smarter than me recently stated an undisputed fact about this project: “Since advocates of high-speed rail claim it is profitable and a wonderful investment for private investors, then by law every government official, manager and union worker involved in high-speed rail should place 100 percent of their personal investment and retirement portfolios into the project. I bet you won’t get one government official, advocate or union worker to accept that condition.”
Amen.
Buzzword Alert:
Infrastructure Spending = Redevelopment spending
Range Fuel Ethanol Plant in Georgia closed after millions of Department of Energy
and Department of Agriculture funding and this is no different than Solyndra.
Stop the DOE “Big Green Energy Science” slush fund!