29 January 2009
H. R. 1
As I’ve heard more and more about the “stimulus” (or as some call it, the “porkulus”) plan that is currently being voted on in our legislature, I decided to find a copy of H. R. 1 and take a look for myself. Well, let me just tell you that it is over 600 pages long and that is essentially just to list all the costs and short descriptions of the uses of the funds. I was only skimming the information, but got weary of it after only making it through about 10% of the information. I have read that the total cost of this bill is estimated to be at least 600 Billion dollars. Billion is hard for a normal person to comprehend. Let’s say you make $50,000 a year. That means that it would take you approximately 12,000 years to earn this much money. Let’s try a more useful figure. If every man, woman and child in the United States had to pay an equal amount towards this plan, it would be close to $2,000. Or we could get every man, woman and child in the world to chip in and get that cost down to closer to $100 per person.
Although the bill hasn’t passed yet, apparently, those in charge don’t have any doubts.
Well, let’s take a look at a few of the numbers in this bill. I added these up from the totals within the paragraphs, so they may not be completely accurate, but give you a good idea. Like I said, I only looked at about 10% of the document, so you could imagine that the list of agencies is about 10 times as long.
| Oversight, Audit and Accountability | $247,500,000 |
| Agriculture | $8,536,000,000 |
| Rural Housing | $22,629,000,000 |
| Rural Utilities | $2,825,000,000 |
| Food and Nutrition | $550,000,000 |
| Commerce | $6,475,000,000 |
| Justice | $4,000,000,000 |
| Science | $3,450,000,000 |
| Defense | $4,850,000,000 |
| Energy and Water | $42,400,000,000 |
A few other interesting tidbits from the document:
- Cannot be used for casino, gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool.
- Any work done on public property, must only use steel that is produced in the US, unless it’s too expensive, or there isn’t enough steel, etc.
- None of the funds are available to the State of Illinois unless that state approves legislation later that allows it, or Rod Blagojavich is no longer governer.
- Any contractor or subcontractor who uses these funds must allow the Comptroller General and his representatives to examine all records related to the contract as well as interview any current employee regarding this.
There is so much to say about this, but I don’t know where to start. I’m not even sure how to comprehend that the federal government is this big. Feel free to comment.
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They’ve done such a fantastic job with everything else with which we have entrusted them. I can’t wait to see how they handle this. If this doesn’t put Keynesian economics in the trash, I don’t know what will.