Still A Little Worried Here

The stimulus has made it through conference! Yea! Or maybe not... The new bill, which only toatals $789 billion just makes my worries from yesterday get a little deeper. Let me go back to the New Deal era of the 1930s. President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided, in 1937 after the original spending was not working, to put the budget aside and worry about it later, which worked really well. But because the Republicans have chosen to be obstructionists and say that if the bill was changed or was to pricey, their support would dissapear, the bill has shrunk. Now, I am all for a balanced budget, it is somehthing I fought for under Bush, and will continue to do so under Obama, but now is not the time to worry about debt and the deficit. We have to spend whatever we can to get the gears of our economy greased and moving again. I don't think that this bill will accomplish as much as it could if we were to make it a little bigger.

The bill, as it is composed today, is 35 percent tax cuts and 65 percent spending, with only $150 billion going toward infrastructure spending. These are bad numbers. 35 percent tax cuts is way too much tax cuts. Now I am all for everyone having lower taxes, but you can have too much of a good thing, way too much actually. Tax cuts are too variable to be reliable. I have said this a thousand times and will contintue to do so. I just don't think we should repeat the same errors that were made when we passed the first stimulus package last year. Putting the money right into peoples pockets will not stimulate the economy!

Now, if we were to shift another 15 percent of the bill from tax cuts, and put it into infrastructure spending, I belive the bill would accomplish much more. Investing in our infrastructure is our best hope for fixing this shambled economy. By investing in these projects like, rebuilding our roads and bridges, modernizing our schools, upgrading our water and sewer systems, revamping our electrical grid, and restabalizing our damns and levees, we could put more than the 3.5 million people back to work than the present bill would do, we could create thousands, maybe millions more jobs. This would still leave 20 percent of the bill for tax cuts which should be more than enough to satisfy the Republicans (which are supposed to be the minority party, but seem to be controlling this entire process).

As I have said, we must be prepared to spend more now, instead of less, in order to properly stimulate our economy and ensure that our country has a good infrastructure to rest upon. Without good infrastructure, our economy would have no physical foundation to rest on.