Marathon Pundit: Obama's stimulus blues

Monday, June 22, 2009

Obama's stimulus blues

The Washington Times raises some interesting points this morning about Barack Obama's ~~economic stimulus bill~~ boondoggle.

It's been four months, and still President Obama has yet to criticize publicly a single project from the $787 billion economic stimulus spending package, despite his Feb. 20 pledge that if federal or state agencies tried to slip any bad spending through, he would "call them out."

With 20,000 expenditures approved, the complaints about bum projects are piling up. Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, released a report last week identifying 100 projects he said were wasteful or silly. But the Obama administration has refused to accept any of his criticisms and is defending the spending, from bike paths to turtle bridges to $300 road signs advertising that stimulus money paid for the project.

"Despite the president's promise that there would be unprecedented oversight, stimulus money is funding wasteful projects and is not producing the jobs Americans desperately need," said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican.

The stimulus package was Mr. Obama's first major accomplishment as president, and he promised taxpayers would be able to track the spending themselves as part of the monitoring process. But the Web site that is meant to track spending has gotten off to a slow start, and Mr. Obama himself has said that with the economy still faltering, the stimulus money isn't going out quickly enough.

After the $700 billion stimulus bill was approved--despite the fact that many of the members of Congress who voted for it didn't bother reading it--a $400 billion Omnibus bill was signed into law. It had 9,000 earmarks.

At the first presidential debate last fall, Candidate Obama had this to say about earmarks:

John, nobody is denying that $18 billion [in earmarks] is important. And, absolutely, we need earmark reform. And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.