My Perspective: Committee Report Stimulus-Spending Bill Passes

As early as Monday morning President Barack Obama will be signing a $787 billion dollar spending bill thanks to both the House and the Senate who voted on the committee report compromise bill. All but 7 Democrats voted yes in the House and all Republicans voted no, while all but 3 Republicans voted no in the Senate. Therefore the bi-partisanship that President Obama preached about he got it in a way because he got 3 Republicans to vote yes but at the same time, President Obama had 7 of his own party members voted against the bill. Nonetheless the original spending bill is down from the $800 billion dollar bill that was originally proposed but it is still the most expensive spending bill in America’s history.

President Obama and the Democratic Party can rejoice in the rush job of the stimulus boondoggle. In fact Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said it best in her press conference that we have gotten things in this quote unquote stimulus package but really it’s a spending bill that the Democratic Party and other interest groups have been working on for years. Yes things they have been working on for years. Last time I checked the spending bill disguised as a stimulus package was suppose to deal with the current recession America was dealing with.

However according to Speaker Pelosi the things involved in this spending bill are things the Democratic Party and special interest groups have been working on for years. So is this 1,100 page spending bill really going to stimulate our economy or is this just what the Democratic Party and President Obama wanted since they couldn’t get it the last 8 years though to the fact they didn’t control Congress for 6 years and the White House would not have signed off on it. Is this the message that we the America people are hearing. Last time I checked, I thought this was a stimulus package not a spending package of wants. Last time I checked, this spending bill was about the needs of the American people and the economy but clearly this is not the case.

Let’s dig deeper at exactly what the passage of the spending bill means. If 75% of jobs come from the small business sector than don’t you think it would be wise to have more tax cuts for small businesses than the tax cuts that the spending bill has for small businesses. Secondly only 11% of the quote unquote stimulus package will be spent in the first year and 50% will be spent after two years from now. This doesn’t sound like stimulus to me but this sounds like a spending that won’t help our economy any time soon. In fact if our economy comes around it won’t be because of this quote unquote stimulus package but it will be because it was time for it to come around.

Think about it people, the U.S. national debt will increase 2 trillion or more if we take into account the stimulus bill, TARP, S-CHIP. This is to occur over the next two years. Therefore we are not even putting into account the fact that America is 60 trillion dollars in debt on Medicare, social security and other programs that we have accumulated over the years. Our GDP is currently at 21% but by the end of this year it will be at 30% GDP. The historical average for our GDP is 20% but at the rate America is going, we could be approaching Europeanization of the GDP. Europeanization of the GDP simply means that in Europe they spend and spend over not caring about saving or cutting. Therefore if America continues down this path than we are headed toward spending so much that our GDP will be close to a 40% by the end of President Obama’s first term.

Remember that in Japan, they spent 6.3 trillion dollars on rebuilding bridges and roads but they were bridges and roads to nowhere. In fact while Japan spent they didn’t address their banks properly and they had bad monetary policies. This is the precedent that America could be heading on with all this spending that our country is doing. While our politicians talk about rebuilding America’s infrastructure we need to make sure that these quote unquote shovel ready projects are projects that build roads and bridges to somewhere. Also we need to fix our banking system and housing industry if we are truly going to avoid the economic hardships that Japan faced from all its spending.

People this committee report is nothing but spending and the more they try to sell it as a stimulus we need to ask ourselves does stimulus leave a $1 trillion dollar debt for our grandchildren to inherit. The entire New Deal cost half of what this spending bill would cost us the American people but this is supposedly the New Deal project that will boast our economy. Imagine this, if we saved $1 a day since the day Jesus Christ was born, we would still have less than what the cost of this spending bill will be. In fact look deeper into this spending bill and you will see that it will be bailing out states with more money than what many of these states need. Is this fiscal responsibility? We are in a recession/depression and we are giving some states nearly 50% more than what they actually need.

This has to be a joke. Someone please pinch me because no one is thinking about what is too much debt and no one is using fiscal responsibility. Does anyone for one second think states will give back what they don’t use to the federal government? I don’t think us. In a time when our nation needs to practice fiscal responsibility in order to dig ourselves out of this depression, we see none. In fact we are participating in what Senator John McCain calls “Generational theft.” We are stealing from the futures of future generations who will have to pay back the accumulation of the national debt that all this spending is driving up. While Senator Chuck Schumer wants to scream that many Republicans didn’t speak up about “Generational theft” the last 8 years but the truth is that many Democrats including Senator Schumer were not speaking up either.

Generational theft is exactly what is taking place as this 1,100 pages of this spending wasn’t made available for the American people to view until midnight. Therefore how can members of Congress vote on a bill that many of them didn’t see the final version of it until today? This is not the transparency that President Obama promised us and the audacity of our government to rush through bills like this one but to stall and take months and years on others makes clearly no sense to us the American people. The fact that the Democratic Party rushed through this bill and didn’t follow the proper channels for this spending bill to even come up for a vote. It is clear that our government will rather rush things that they deem important to them but wait on things that could help us the American people.

Our government doesn’t mind spending our money on things they see fit but when it comes to bailing out the American people and helping us, they stall time and time again. This spending bill is not any real relief to the American people. Why couldn’t the average tax payer receive $3,000 back in a tax cut and couples receive $5,000? Why does Speaker Pelosi speak about a stimulus package being timely, temporary and targeted but this bill does only one out of three. America when will we wake up and realize that we are being tricked into things that don’t help us but will simply hurt future generations. No one wants to speak about the national debt in this country and no one wants to speak about why our Congress creates huge bills that are 1,000 plus pages when it could easily be 50 pages.

Generational theft is real and it is something that will continue to take place until we the American people step up and realize that we are trending down a path that we as a nation don’t want to go down any longer. Our politicians are playing us as fools and this spending bill that many are calling a stimulus package is a joke. Don’t be tricked people. Our federal government knows what they are doing when they create bills that are 1,000 plus pages. They don’t want us to read them and they can put whatever they want in them. Don’t be surprised if the 1,100 page spending bill is filled with pork because trust me, it is. President Barack Obama will sign it and make it law thus signing his doom.

Wake up America; we are heading down a path that is very dangerous and scary for future generations of America. The committee report spending bill passed and now a new wave of spending in America is unleashed.