Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I found this great site called Read the Stimulus, which has the tagline of:

$850 Billion, 1588 pages, and counting…somebody needs to read it!

1588 pages! This bill was released 5 days ago. Even if your full-time job was to read the bill (8 hours/day) and you read over the weekend, you’d need to read 40 pages an hour to read the whole thing. There’s no way that our politicians read this thing.

They are about to spend $850,000,000,000! It would be nice to have some oversight here. I bet there are lots and lots of wasteful things in this bill.

For example, if you look at page 147 of the House version of the bill, you’ll see the following:

1 (4) not less than $335,000,000 shall be used as

2 an additional amount to carry out domestic HIV/

3 AIDS, viral hepatitis, sexually-transmitted diseases,

4 and tuberculosis prevention programs, as jointly de-

5 termined by the Secretary and the Director;

$355 million on STD prevention in a economic stimulus plan? Regardless of the merits of government STD education, this sort of spending does not belong in a economic stimulus plan; how exactly does it create jobs?

To put a bit of perspective to this number: you could employ almost 9000 new teachers for this money.

But here’s the most interesting part. Washington is telling us that they must act soon before it’s too late. But it turns out that only 20% of the bill is for spending in 2009. The rest comes in 2010 and later.

So what’s the rush? Why not just pass the 20% that will be spent this year now? Then you can slow down and take the time to read about the rest of the spending.

It seems to me that Washington is creating a false sense of urgency to pass another pork-laden, wasteful, spending bill. Which is the very last thing we need as our country plunges deeper into recession.