Ok, so who else is following the current "stimulus" package? In the past year or so i’ve actually started making an effort to keep an ear on politics. See what’s going on in the world of our government and the elected officials we’ve chosen. I do this mostly by listening to a few talk channels on XM. One is Fox news talk, I can’t say i like all of their shows, but one I do is Brian and the Judge. I like how they seem a little more balanced than most radio shows. A lot of shows have one host, who has his own opinions on how things should be done, and he tries to convince all of his listeners that his way is right, and everyone else is a freakin moron. Anyway, this show has two hosts, and they bring in more than one point of view, they don’t just agree with each other all the time. They even argue with each other if they dont agree.

They’ve been following this new stimulus plan pretty closely. Did you know that they’re talking about a sum of $925,000,000,000.00 this time around. Now, it seems like just yesterday that the government decided to take $700,000,000,000.00 of the taxpayer’s money, and then threw $350,000,000,000.00 at a number of banks, businesses, and whatnot, and from what I’m hearing, it didn’t help! The recipients took the money, put it into bonuses, jets, limo’s, vacations, whatever, things that AREN’T helping the economy! So now we’re talking about taking more money, which I assume is to come from the taxpayers, and giving it out to more businesses and agencies? On top of that, a ton of the proposed money is to go to things like the FBI, and Police harley’s?! What does any of that have to do with stimulating the economy?

I heard this morning from someone they interviewed, sorry, I missed her name, but they were talking about this bill, and how it got so bloated. She said something along the lines of: The bill has to have enough "pork" to please the democratic members, and it has to be lean enough to please the republican members.

Ok.. WTF?! I have a better idea.. How about they steal just enough of our money to FIX THE DAMN PROBLEM. If they think that this stimulus can work, ok, that’s all well and good, if they really think it’ll work, and it works, then I guess it’s worth it. I can’t claim to be some economist, so I’m not going to say it wont work. I feel like it wont work, but I’ve been wrong before. Anyway, if it’s going to work, why not focus on making it work, and not what we can tack on to it?

The other thing I don’t quite understand is how this is going to help. How can spending more money get us out of all of this? Wouldn’t the point of a stimulus be to put money back into the pockets of the citizens. So they can in turn spend that money on things, thus improving the economy? Make some decent jobs to get the unemployment down, maybe cut some taxes so a little less of my paycheck gets taken away from me and put into some government account, that I then have to hire a damned accountant to get a little back at the end of the year.

I’m not blaming Obama just yet. I can’t say that I’ve heard any real evidence that he’s behind the whole thing, it sounds more like the senate/house to me. Everyone’s quick to blame the president just because he’s in charge, and I don’t approve of that, I think it’s better to see who’s really behind things before just blaming the leader. So I’m not going to go ahead and say it’s all his fault. Because right now i don’t think it is.

At any rate, I think cutting costs, rather than spending money, is what’s going to help us out the most. It’s very possible that i don’t understand all of the things at work here. So maybe I’m wrong, but some of the reports I hear about this stimulus bill, just burn me up.

-War