One week. That’s all the House of Representatives might have to read, discuss, debate, and vote on a bill that will spend an estimated three quarters of a trillion dollars. (And that’s before President Elect Obama has his input, which I somehow doubt will lower that number.)
One week to vet the spending of $2,500 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Of my money and your money. That’s only one second of consideration per $1,240,079.37. Would you trust anyone to give you good advice on how to spend over a million bucks with only a second to think about it?
One of the problems with a government that’s too big is that it necessarily removes control from the people, which deprives us of our right to control our own affairs. If this bill is passed, our elected representatives will have punted their responsibility to unelected – and therefore unaccountable – bureaucrats. They won’t have any idea if the money is actually helping, if it’s being siphoned for corrupt purposes, if it’s being wasted by incompetence, etc. And they will claim ignorance and outrage when the inevitable occurs.
I’ve been clear in this space about my contempt for government bailouts in general, and this is no different. If certain industries or certain infrastructure improvements will actually help the economy, each seperate expenditure should be voted on alone, on its own merits, with SPECIFIC and transparently studied justification presented to the Congress. But to simply sign over a blank check to God-knows-who won’t help anything.
Unfortunately, that’s what we’re going to be stuck with, and no matter what happens, the chuckleheads who vote for this kind of thing will claim success. If things get better, they will praise the rescue bill while having NO idea what it actually did to help anything. If things get worse, as I suspect, then they will laud the bill as having prevented things from getting worse – once again, without having the first clue as to just how that all actually worked.
Oh, well. I guess I wasn’t using that $2,500 for anything important anyway.
[…] what do they do when they’re in office? Well, as of late, they spend as little time possible debating ways to “jumpstart” the economy. Personally, I think maybe we should take the roughly $91 million dollars in salary (not to […]
The bailout was not something the majority of Americans supported. I find it insulting that our “elected” leaders decided to pass the bill anyway. Democracy at its best, right?
I heard on the news today that the officials are expressing consternation with banks who received TARP funds because they are not loosening up credit. We need to closely monitor these banks, officials are now saying, so they do what we thought they would do with the money.
Shouldn’t they have thought of that when they passed the bill…that the banks would not use the money in the way Congress envisioned? That’s what a rushed bill gets you, a lot of worthless hindsight.
They always do whatever they want. The market shows zero confidence after a trillion in printed money was handed out.