Quick Friday Theft/Pork Update #3

You know, I'm getting kind of tired of reporting on all the crap that's in this thing!  I'm sure you're equally tired of reading about it.  *sigh*  But, in the interest of preserving America as the last bastion of freedom and capitalism in the world, we shall continue as long as we must.

An interesting indicator that the game's not over yet:

Dianne Feinstein: "I reserve the right at the end of the day to vote against the package that I don't think puts these jobs out there."

She's part of the "bipartisan group" trying to cut some spending out of the bill to make it more palatable. However, she seems to be announcing that the bill has to change quite a bit -- those "major changes" the Gallup poll found that 37% of the public (and rising) wanted -- or she won't vote for it. A shot across the bow of the Pelosi-Obama-Reid faction which is determined to simply win, baby, win with a crap bill, just to show they can.

We'll see by tonight.  Just keep calling, especially the Queasy Quartet of Specter, Snowe, Collins, and Voinovich.

Here's a major concern that I hadn't even thought of in regard to this bill:

Picking up on Hemingway's point about  baseline bloat being a major concern, here's Kevin Hassett in a great column (worth revisiting) from last month:

One reason the increase is so dramatic is the mystery of compounding. Each year, Congress passed pork-laden expenditure bills, which became part of the long-run baseline the minute they became law. Each time that the federal government wasted a billion dollars, it created budget space to waste $1 billion again and again, ad infinitum.

That's perhaps the scariest fact about next year's budget. The skyrocketing spending of 2009 will be the CBO baseline for every year after that. It will be easy to provide health care to everyone; the budget space will be blocked out. Indeed, Congress can spend with impunity in years to come, covered by the protective shroud of the CBO baseline that this year delivers.

We can ride big government spending and trillion-dollar deficits all the way to 2017, when the Social Security trust fund itself starts running deficits.

This year may establish a government-spending black hole with gravity strong enough to suck the U.S. economy over the event horizon. Such a spending path has two possible endgames. Neither is pretty.

Basically, this is the normal process of government - instead of starting each year's budget with $0, they start with whatever they spent the year before and pile on from there.  That's why government always grows.  The closest thing we ever see to actual 'cuts' in government are really just a reduction in the growth - if last year's budget was $3.7 trillion, we start this year with only $3.7 trillion rather than $4.2 trillion (or whatever the expected rate of growth would be).  If Obama and the Dems ram this through, our starting point for next year will be phenomenally higher than it is now, thus opening the floodgates of even more wasteful spending than we're seeing now (though that's truly difficult to imagine).  Can we say disaster, anyone?

Here are some more reasons to hate and oppose this bill:

Word on the street--or, more correctly, the Hill--is that Senator Harry Reid is keeping his fingers crossed for a vote this afternoon on the larger-than-life stimulus bill.

While we still have time, then, it's worthwhile to take another look at what's actually in the thing.  The National Review has compiled 50 examples, including $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, $150 million for the Smithsonian, $448 million for a new Homeland Security headquarters, and $850 million for that model of productivity known as Amtrak. "Other features leap out," they report:  "Of the $4 billion set aside for the Community Oriented Policing Services—COPS—program, half is allocated for communities of fewer than 150,000 people. That's $2 billion to fight nonexistent crime waves in places like Frog Suck, Wyo., and Hoople, N.D."

*sigh*  Just keep dialing that phone...

I've really lost a lot of respect for Peggy Noonan over the past few months - she was one of those Republican elites who called for a more moderate party, then bailed for Obama when it looked like McCain (precisely the kind of moderate she was calling for) was going to lose.  As such, I don't really count her opinion as that valuable anymore, but she does hit the nail on the head with this statement in the Wall Street Journal:

All week the word I kept thinking of was "braced." America is braced, like people who are going fast and see a crash ahead. They know huge and historic challenges are here. They're not confident they can or will be met. Our most productive citizens are our most sophisticated, and our most sophisticated have the least faith in the ability of our institutions to face the future and get us through whole. They have the least faith because they work in them. ...

On the economy, I continue to find no one, Democrat or Republican, who has faith that the stimulus bill passed by the House will solve anything or make anything better, though many argue that doing absolutely nothing will surely make things worse by not promising at least the possibility of improvement through action.

Meanwhile, the inquest on President Obama's great stimulus mistake continues.

His serious and consequential policy mistake is that he put his prestige behind not a new way of breaking through but an old way of staying put. This marked a dreadful misreading of the moment.

Interesting food for thought.

Here are a couple more new details worth passing along.  The 'Maverick' John McCain seems to have finally found a spine on excessive spending (only about four months too late):

"I'll tell you how we got here, Mr. President. We got here here by the Speaker of the House saying, "We won, so we wrote the bill." That's not what the years I've been here is called bipartisanship. So without the votes of 11 democrats and without the votes of a single Republican the bill emerged from the other body and came over here... The bill was written with negligible input from this side of the aisle.

So what are we up to now? We are up to approximately one trillion dollars... The Congressional Budget Office yesterday said that this legislation would increase employment by the end of the 4th quarter of 2010 by 1.3 million to 3.9 million jobs... I did the math... A 1.2 trillion dollar bill, 3 million jobs, is $923,997 for each job.

...Maybe we should go back to the beginning here.

That's some sobering math, don't you think?  Once again, the median job for Americans is about $50,000.  How much sense does it make to spend almost $1 million of taxpayer money to create a $50,000 job?  Liberal math just doesn't add up in the real world.

What's becoming more apparent with each passing hour is the desperation from Democrat leaders.  You know what the latest defense on how much ridiculous spending is in this bill?

"So what?"

I kid you not.  What a great reason to spend $1 trillion of taxpayer money.  Victor Davis Hanson observes the hysteria this way:

What Obama needs to do is to explain to the American people just three things:

1) What exactly does he think was the cause of the current financial panic if not over-borrowing, unsustainable household and national debt, and reckless government housing policies, along with too accessible amounts of capital?

2) Why would outdoing what we did—borrowing, spending, printing cash—be a Zen-like fix of the problem?

3) Why, after seeing a hasty bailout result in messy consequences, would a hasty stimulus not result in messy consequences?

Such calm, fireside-chat explanations would be much better than these nearly hourly hysterical proclamations from his team about catastrophes, depressions, and disasters. When one adds up what Obama himself has said, what the Pelosi/Reid team have said, and what various cabinet members have voiced (farming doomed here in California?), either the USA is about ready to explode, or its leaders have become unhinged.

Of course, he can't actually offer up acceptable explanations for these questions, so he resorts to the same sort of hysteria and scare tactics that he decried in the campaign.

Classic liberalism.

The vote is supposed to happen before 7pm Eastern time tonight, so call now or forever give up your right to complain about what happens in the next two years.

There's my two cents.