Posted on 11/18/2021 10:08:47 AM PST by Kaslin
Remember those "shovel-ready jobs" promised by the Obama-Biden administration in 2011? When many failed to appear after passage of this spending boondoggle, President Obama joked, "Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected."
That law, noted Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), cost $787 billion, of which $48 billion was supposed to go for infrastructure. It was disingenuously called the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein calculated that each job created would cost taxpayers $200,000. When asked about this statistic in a September 26, 2011 interview with ABC News, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did not dispute the figure, saying, "the price tag is the wrong way to measure the bill's worth." We're hearing similar assertions about the new law.
Welcome to "shovel-ready 2.0" and another swindle that has just been perpetrated on us in the name of "infrastructure." Swindle means "to obtain by fraud or deceit." The administration and congressional Democrats claim the bill will cost us nothing. That's because they have used accounting gimmicks and rely on money they hope will come in through tax increases. Won't that cost something?
The new law is 2,700 pages long. I would bet my house payment that no Member of Congress read it all before voting on it. The Heritage Foundation has dug into the details and revealed items that add to the debt, probably increase already high inflation, and likely boost the cost of essential goods and services.
For starters, says a team of Heritage analysts, "it bails out the Highway Trust Fund to the tune of $118 billion. The fund suffers from chronic deficits due to overspending. Rather than bring it into balance, senators are whipping out the national credit card, and then pretending they didn't when it comes to keeping score." This is throwing good money after bad, since when it comes to government programs failure is never an excuse to spend less money.
The analysts write: "There is a laundry list of tired budget gimmicks, including the sale of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, extending long-standing fees, and spectrum sales. Many of these gimmicks have a history of falling short of expectations." See last sentence in the previous paragraph.
The law was sold to the public with promises that airports, highways and bridges will be repaired. In fact, note the Heritage analysts, the law "adds as much new spending to modes like mass transit and Amtrak as it does for highways, even though buses and rail account for only a tiny fraction of travel. Even the value of highway funding is hampered by wasteful set-asides: $2 million per year for bee-friendly landscaping, $50 million per year to combat weeds, and expensive mandates that give unionized contractors a leg up on taxpayer-friendly, non-union shops." If history is a guide, one or more of these set-asides benefit the special interests of members, possibly in exchange for their votes.
It's an old joke, but true: How do you tell when a politician is lying? When his lips are moving. Unlike those who voted for this legislation, take the time to read it yourself, along with the analysis. You will likely conclude they have swindled us again.
Cal Thomas was one of the idiots on the National Review “Against Trump” cover.
The reason that the jobs weren't shovel-ready was all those environmental regulations. It can take more than a decade to get the environmental reviews completed and approved by the EPA for a simple highway overpass. The bigger the project, the more hoops you need to jump through to get from project inception to the first shovel.
Obama could have issued an executive order suspending all those regulations for the projects intended, but that would have enraged the green lobby, which was critical to his election.
The final result was that certain big-ticket rail improvement projects were financed in Illinois, California, North Carolina and Washington state where all the necessary studies had been completed years ago and were sitting in DOT file cabinets awaiting a check.
Most of the money went unspent and was refunded to the Treasury in the 4th quarter of 2017.
ROTFLMAO!!!!!!! tell me another!
Yep. We have forgotten.
This kind of thing never meant to be engineering project. It’s always political project. Using infrastructure as cover, they loot treasury and enrich themselves. If you don’t believe, try to memorize or take photo of major infrastructures that need improvement in tour area. Wait for 10 years to see if they change. I bet they never change
The Biden trillion dollar Steal and Swindle Bill
is subtitled
The Biden Crime Family Billionaire Enabling Bill.
Even the littlest Bidens get to be billionaires.
The environmental regulations and residents opposing construction are behind all major construction problems.
They build short Phoenix bypass. ~30 years of lawsuits. 2 years of construction.
Even the California speed train project is stuck because of these!
Since they cannot build anything fast, they will just resurface corner crossing, making them even more wheelchair friendly. The third or fourth time!
<>No Member of Congress read it all before voting on it.<>
Heh, heh.
Just keep voting. Pretend we still live in a democratic republic.
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