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Opening Arguments

Stimulus update

Gee, do you think?

The Obama administration's economic stimulus plan could end up wasting billions of dollars by attempting to spend money faster than an overburdened government acquisition system can manage and oversee it, according to documents and interviews with contracting specialists.

But that's perfectly OK, says Michael Hirsh of Newsweek:

When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There's no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

That's some real good government watchdogging there, Michael. In the meantime, the Congressional Budget office says that the recession will end in 2009, without a stimulus. and that the stimulus over the long term will cause more harm than good:

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

Comments

tim zank
Mon, 02/09/2009 - 12:17pm

Recessions come and go, bad politicians & press corps are for life.

Doug
Mon, 02/09/2009 - 12:47pm

Got a link to the actual CBO report? Know anyone who does? Because my source tells me it doesn't exist:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/23/a-controversial-cbo-repor_n_160495.html

Or were you talking about this:
http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/stimsummary.pdf

which apparently isn't an official CBO product and has too many caveats to be relied upon in any serious way.

Hopefully the truth will be getting its boots on any time now.

Leo Morris
Mon, 02/09/2009 - 1:15pm

The report that the Huffington Post says doesn't exist is one about the stimulus plan not being effective, not one about when the recession might end. Perhaps the CBO's blog ( http://cboblog.cbo.gov/ ) would be of some help.

Steven T.
Mon, 02/09/2009 - 3:07pm

Hirsh of Newsweek says: " There

Steve G
Mon, 02/09/2009 - 8:16pm

Oh, $50-100 million is less than one percent of the total for the bill. It's not that much to worry about. Uh, correct me if I'm wrong but that is still $100 million of TAXPAYER money. It's not the relative amount to overall spending, it's still money spent. It's still money that will need to be repaid. How they have so lost touch with the significance of spending other peoples' money.

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