Tornado Alley (PROG)

[wbmw]

Wall_Rus, I see you've responded with (if you'll allow me to paraphrase), "It all depends on what your definition of 'earmark' is."

Alright, if you want to have a discussion on that, we can.

The problem is that your definition of earmark might differ from mine, and it will surely differ from the meaning for millions of other people. What's good for my town won't be good for your town, and what seems like waste for you might be a legitimate project to me.

So how do we resolve our differences - and also, are these differences even reconcilable? Can we pass any kind of spending legislation that can make everybody happy?

I don't think we can, and I don't think we had time to debate it, at least, not when the economy was crashing down, and several things were happening:

1. The economy was contracting because people weren't spending
2. State revenues were falling due to unemployment and costs were rising due to greater need for entitlements, which were causing many states to consider laying off public employees
3. Companies were laying off workers and accelerating the unemployment numbers

Obama had Congress pass a bill that addressed these three things, by:

1. Providing middle-class tax cuts to give people more to spend
2. Providing state subsidies to meet their budgets and prevent further layoffs
3. Create projects that would funnel money through state agencies to local contractors and small/medium busiensses to fund infrastructure and new technology

A third of the bill went towards each of these, and what are the results?

2,000,000 jobs saved or created, and a GDP that is now on the rise.

So you can talk about earmarks or government waste, but it's a retrospective criticism. The data shows that the economy improved in the wake of the bill, which logically means it met its intended goals.

In order to argue against that, you'd have to argue that the economy would have improved anyway, and that all that money was wasteful, but the problem is that most economists don't agree with that. Most economists are attributing the recovery to the Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

That's just a fact, but I'm sure people will debate it, anyway.