What's That Smell?

It must be the stinking carcass of the stimulus package!

The more details I hear about the stimulus bill (or as Rush refers to it, the 'porkulus' bill) the less I like. There's too damn much making it into the legislation that has little, if anything to do with stimulating the economy. It starts to read like a shopping list of things the Dems have had on their wish list but could never passed under normal circumstances.

When you realize that less than 5% of that stimulus bill will actually go to infrastructure improvements, something that Obama had promised would head the list of stimulus recipients, you know the stimulus is more smoke and mirrors than actual help to get the economy moving again.

One of the more insidious parts of the package is what is being called a 'stealth' provision that would undo the welfare reform of the mid-1990's and return it to the bad old days of welfare queens and multi-generations welfare families.

Buried deep inside the massive spending orgy that Democrats jammed through the House this week lie five words that could drastically undo two decades of welfare reforms.

The very heart of the widely applauded Welfare Reform Act of 1996 is a cap on the amount of federal cash that can be sent to states each year for welfare payments.

But, thanks to the simple phrase slipped into the legislation, the new “stimulus” bill abolishes the limits on the amount of federal money for the so-called Emergency Fund, which ships welfare cash to states.

“Out of any money in the Treasury of the United States not otherwise appropriated, there are appropriated such sums as are necessary for payment to the Emergency Fund,” Democrats wrote in Section 2101 on Page 354 of the $819 billion bill. In other words, the only limit on welfare payments would be the Treasury itself.

“This re-establishes the welfare state and creates dependency all over the place,” said one startled budget analyst after reading the line.

In addition to reopening the floodgates of dependency on federal welfare programs, the change once again deepens the dependency of state governments on the federal government.

Conservatives and moderates fought for almost 30 years to undo the damage created by LBJ's social experiment, the Great Society, which trapped people in poverty and left them entirely dependent on government largess. The War on Poverty was a disaster, creating far more poverty than it cured. And now the Democrats want to return to that failed experiment, expanding their constituency (it seems those impoverished by the government always seem to vote of Democrats, the very people that made them poor), as well as their control over them.

There's plenty of other pork in the bill. The Dems are even being blatant about it, not bothering to hide their actions, hoping that the crisis they helped create will distract the electorate from the wasteful and non-productive spending orgy upon which they're about to embark.

There is so much junk in this economic stimulus package that it is designed to fail. Any hopes that people had that Obama would govern pragmatically and from the left-center are now completely out the window.

On the positive side, he is already overreaching and there is only so much patience that this country will have for far-left policies that don’t work. By 2010 or 2012, the people will be sick of these policies, and Republicans, as long as they offer a better vision of the future and policies that make sense, will be poised to regain power. Hopefully, the damage done by Obama and the Democrats will not be irreversible by then.

Unfortunately it doesn't take much time to wreck the economy and a long time to repair it.

What makes this hypocrisy worse is the Republicans in Congress have offered their own stimulus plan that costs half of what the Democrats are offering and doing it differently. The biggest difference? The Republican plan will work.

Why?

Because Republicans would rather provide heavy tax cuts and give the money back to the taxpayers and let them spend their own money to stimulate the economy. All the Democratic plan does is “spread the wealth around”, something that has never worked. (For those less in tune with this phrase, it basically means socialism, a morally and financially bankrupt system that tries very hard to make sure everyone is equally poor and does its best to discourage innovation and hard work.)

How do we know the Republican plan will work and the Democratic plan won't? History. Every time there's been a tax cut, the economy grows. Every time the government sucks billions out of the economy through taxes, heavy spending, and the expansion of the government, the economy shrinks.

Which one do you want to see happen?