A closer look at the stimulus package

The administration, the liberal Pelosi-Reid led Congress and their media cohorts are interpreting their plan to jump start the economy so that public opinion will be on their side, of course. But most Americans don’t get into the details of such bulky legislation, which is why they rely on the….uh….media.

Let’s look elsewhere for some critical analysis. Like the Heritage Foundation. Here’s one of the parts that concerns me:

Expanded Medicaid coverage and SCHIP: Reid-Pelosi-Obama are enacting a nationalized health care policy with no debate. The government will soon be responsible for more health care spending than the private sector, i.e. socialized medicine.

We must have a better health care system. Nationalizing or socializing it is not the answer. It will usher in a chilling new era of utilititarian medicine that will be rationed according to what a federal health board coldly calculates as acceptable to them in a ‘cost-benefit ratio’ analysis.

Here’s some WSJ analysis of the stimulus package.

This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.

We’ve looked it over, and even we can’t quite believe it.

There’s $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There’s even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.

In selling the plan, President Obama has said this bill will make “dramatic investments to revive our flagging economy.” Well, you be the judge.

They looked at the itemized list of spending targets, and

by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus.

Education gets a whopping allowance, too, but not actually for education in the classical sense. It’s $66 billion.

That’s more than the entire Education Department spent a mere 10 years ago and is on top of the doubling under President Bush. Some $6 billion of this will subsidize university building projects. If you think the intention here is to help kids learn, the House declares on page 257 that “No recipient . . . shall use such funds to provide financial assistance to students to attend private elementary or secondary schools.”

Payback to teacher’s unions and discrimination against private education, school vouchers and parents’ choice.

Most of the rest of this project spending will go to such things as renewable energy funding ($8 billion) or mass transit ($6 billion) that have a low or negative return on investment. Most urban transit systems are so badly managed that their fares cover less than half of their costs. However, the people who operate these systems belong to public-employee unions that are campaign contributors to . . . guess which party?

…..

This is supposed to be a new era of bipartisanship, but this bill was written based on the wish list of every living — or dead — Democratic interest group. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, “We won the election. We wrote the bill.” So they did.

Voters will credit them with that in the mid-term elections, late next year.