Free Republic

For months, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has been saying that $5.6 billion in additional federal funds through the Biden administration’s stimulus program won’t come close to addressing all of the state’s road and bridge needs. Now, a national online research organization agrees, at least on money for needed bridge work. InMyArea Research released a report last week that claims the $26.2 billion in stimulus funds for bridges nationwide over the next five years falls an estimated $7.3 billion short of the amount needed just to upgrade bridges rated in poor condition. Pennsylvania’s allocation of $1.63 billion for bridges is...

STILWELL, Kan. — Traffic whizzing behind her, Rep. Sharice Davids gathered reporters at a transportation facility along U.S. 69 in eastern Kansas this week to celebrate the surge of federal money headed in her state’s direction. The massive infrastructure package passed last week means $2.6 billion for Kansas roads — some of the largest investments in them since President Dwight D. Eisenhower, once a Kansan himself, supported the construction of the national highway system in the 1950s. Davids is hardly the only member of her party celebrating. With their narrow control of Congress at stake in 2022, Democrats across the...

President Trump’s tax reform has delivered more than a trillion dollars of stimulus to the American economy through corporations repatriating profits held overseas in order to avoid penalties that the tax law had imposed on bringing home the funds earned abroad. Bloomberg reports: Corporations have brought back more than $1 trillion of overseas profits to the U.S. since Congress overhauled the international tax system and prodded companies to repatriate offshore funds, a report showed Thursday. (snip) Investment banks and think tanks have estimated that American corporations held $1.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion in offshore cash at the time the law was enacted. Before the overhaul,...

The bridge was supposed to last for more than 100 years and withstand a Category 5 hurricane. Instead it came crashing down on people occupied cars within days of its construction. Celebrated leading visionary bridge engineer Atorod Azizinamini, whose ABC (Accelerated Bridge Construction) technology was used to build the bridge that collapsed yesterday on Florida International University’s campus, was named an Obama era Department of Transportation ‘Champion of Change’ in 2015. The event in which Azizinaminif was awarded ‘Champion of Change’ status was webcast live at whitehouse.gov/live, no longer online.

The White House on Monday will unveil its long-awaited $1.5 trillion infrastructure package aimed at overhauling U.S. public works. The plan is structured around four goals: generate $1.5 trillion for an infrastructure proposal, streamline the permitting process down to two years, invest in rural infrastructure projects and advance workforce training. The current system is fundamentally broken and it’s broken in two different ways,” a senior administration official told reporters in a Saturday phone call. “We are underinvesting in our infrastructure, and we have a permitting process that takes so long that even when funds are adequate, it can take a...

President Donald Trump says shovel-ready projects will be the priority in the estimated $1 trillion infrastructure-improvement initiative over the next decade that he hopes to unveil later this year. “If you have a job that you can’t start within 90 days, we’re not going to give you money for it,” Trump said on Feb. 4 during a White House town hall session with 52 business leaders.Meanwhile, as reported by the Wall Street Journal on March 10, the American Society of Civil Engineers, in its latest “Infrastructure Report Card” that’s issued every four years, gave this country’s infrastructure the below-standard grade...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hailed President Obama’s stimulus program on Sunday, telling ABC’s “This Week” that within one month of Obama’s inauguration, “he signed a bill which saved or created 4 million jobs.” Pelosi invoked the controversial $832-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to unfavorably compare President Donald Trump to former President Obama at the one-month mark: “What has the Trump administration done from their inaugural address, where they talked about decay and carnage? They've done nothing except put Wall Street first, make America sick again, instill fear in our immigrant population in our country, and make sure...

Ten U.S. states still have not regained all the jobs they lost in the Great Recession, even after six and a half years of recovery, while many more have seen only modest gains. […] Wyoming had 3 percent fewer jobs last month than it did in December 2007, when the recession began, the Labor Department said Friday. That is the biggest percentage decline among the states. Alabama's job total trails its pre-recession level by 2.7 percent, followed by New Mexico, where job totals are 2.6 percent lower. Some larger states are also still behind. New Jersey has nearly 1 percent...

President Barack Obama is heading to Florida to tout the benefits of the massive economic stimulus bill he signed shortly after taking office seven years ago. Obama pumped more than $760 billion into a then-slumping economy beginning in early 2009 in a frantic effort to halt the worst economic downturn in generations. It was an unsettling period for many Americans as hundreds of thousands of jobs disappeared, unemployment climbed into double digits and home values plummeted. Obama will argue during a stop in Jacksonville on Friday that the country is on a more solid footing because of this and other...

Police arrested a congressional staffer to Democratic Rep. Sander Levin Oct. 8 following a bizarre altercation where he attacked a lover with a shovel. According to a police report, Tim Foster assaulted a black man described as his boyfriend with a small red and black shovel, leaving the man so badly injured that he was hospitalized with scrapes and bruises across his neck and torso, Roll Call reported Tuesday. The dispute began at about 12:30 a.m., with the two getting into an argument at a house in Baltimore which soon escalated to physical violence on Foster’s part, according to Roll...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. economy went into reverse in the first three months of this year as a severe winter and a widening trade deficit took a harsher toll than initially estimated. The Commerce Department says the overall economy as measured by the gross domestic product contracted at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the January-March period. The revised figure, even weaker than the government's initial estimate of a 0.2 percent growth rate, reflects a bigger trade gap and slower consumer spending. It marked the first decline since a 2.1 percent contraction in the first three months of...

A Wisconsin business owner upset over enactment of a right-to-work law and other policies says he is expanding in Minnesota because the economic policies there are more conducive for his operation. James Hoffman, president of Hoffman Construction in Black River Falls, said Monday that he was accelerating plans to expand an office in Lakeville, Minnesota, that currently has two full-time employees. […] Hoffman says the decision is based on business, not politics. …

Nearly two weeks after Congress approved the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama has officially vetoed the bill calling for its construction. The decision follows a clear statement from the White House last month saying the president would not sign the bill into law if Congress, currently controlled by Republican lawmakers, passed it.

Declaring an end to “mindless austerity,” President Barack Obama called for a surge in government spending Thursday, and asked Congress to throw out the sweeping budget cuts both parties agreed to four years ago when deficits were spiraling out of control. Obama’s proposed $74 billion in added spending—about 7 percent—would be split about evenly between defense programs and the domestic side of the budget. Although he’s sought before to reverse the “sequester” spending cuts, Obama’s pitch in this year’s budget comes with the added oomph of an improving economy and big recent declines in federal deficits. Taking a defiant tone,...

President Barack Obama says he will try to undertake an overhaul of the tax system with the new Republican majorities in Congress. He says the “devil is in the details.” He says the tax system needs to be simpler and fairer. He says some corporations engage in tax avoidance while others pay full freight. He also says he would like to combine tax changes with money for capital works projects. …

Almost six years after the passage of the stimulus package, taxpayer dollars have finally found their way into a shovel ready project: $60,000 to haul horse manure. Sold as an opportunity to bring America into the “21st century,” the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the stimulus, is now being used to remove wild horse manure off of public lands.

Didn't see a live thread.....so here you go.

Five years ago, Democrats spent $700 billion on “fiscal stimulus,” much of which was supposed to consist of “public-works projects to repair the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.”

(CNSNews.com) - As job growth lags in the sluggish economic recovery, the Obama White House is pointing to climate change policies as a fix: Efforts to reduce carbon pollution, far from costing jobs, will create them, a White House spokesman told reporters on Wednesday: "Retrofitting buildings and modernizing them is one way to create jobs," Josh Earnest said. "It saves companies money in terms of their energy costs, but it also creates jobs in terms of people who are installing updated lighting, modern heating and cooling systems, and other things that make buildings more efficient." Earnest noted that President Obama...

When you get what you want, you find out it’s not what you need. That is what Millennials are experiencing right now as the liberal program they voted for in 2008 and 2012 is being implemented. […] Millennials are now seeing an America they cannot thrive in. The trillion-dollar stimulus and out of control government spending ushered in by liberal politicians produced few shovel ready jobs, while leaving per capita debt at $52,948. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2013 labor force participation rate of those in their twenties has hit the lowest level on record since 1981....