Tag Archives: stimulus money

Newsweek has uncovered letters showing Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Hypocriteville) begging for stimulus money

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Letters Reveal Eric Cantor Begged for Stimulus Money to Create Jobs

During a March 1, 2009 appearance on ABC’s This Week, Rep. Cantor said that the government can’t create jobs, “And what we see in this budget, frankly, is an attempt, again, to try and stimulate the economy through government expenditure. And, you know, at best what that can do is redistribute wealth. It can’t create jobs; it can’t create wealth. We’ve got to get back to focusing on job creation and creating prosperity.”

Newsweek has uncovered letters that show Rep. Cantor requesting hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars for his district at the same time; he was publicly claiming that government can’t create jobs.

Just a month after going on ABC and claiming that the government can’t create jobs, Cantor sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to request almost $75 million in federal stimulus funds for the I-95 high speed rail project. Cantor along with Rep. Bobby Scott wrote that, “High speed rail provides a sensible and viable solution to our region’s transportation challenges. It is estimated that creating a high speed railway through Virginia will generate as many as 185,500 jobs, as much as $21.2 billion in economic development, and put nearly 6.5 million cars off the road annually.”

via: manicchill

Republican Teaparty politicians say one thing publicly, for the low-information teabagger base, but do the opposite in private, if possible. Because what appeals to teabaggers would be a disaster for the country.

Government DOES, in fact, create jobs. Republicans FAIL at admitting that fact in public.

GOP on stimulus money: oppose in public, request in private

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The Star-Tribune reports:

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota voted against what she calls “the failed Pelosi trillion-dollar stimulus,” but that didn’t stop her from writing letters to federal agencies on behalf of seven grant applications seeking stimulus dollars for her district.

And many more conservatives did the same thing. Criticize stimulus / earmarks in public, and go around to the backdoor to request money for their districts:

Stimulus, Earmark Critics Try Back Door For Funds

The Center for Public Integrity has discovered that lawmakers, instead of going through the congressional earmark process, have written directly to federal departments with backdoor requests for stimulus funds. It’s a practice known as lettermarking…

[...] The Obama administration tried to insulate the bill from lettermarks by ordering agencies not to consider the requests, Solomon says. But the calls and letters poured in, he says, from everyone from Democrats who had crowed there would be no earmarks to Republicans who had panned the stimulus bill for failing to create jobs.

“But when they wrote the letter to try to get money for their local district or local company, they said, ‘This project is going to create jobs, and we hope you give it stimulus money,’ and so their letters undercut the arguments they make politically on the campaign trail or on FOX and MSNBC,” he says.

 

23 Aug: Morning in the bunker

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Park51 Mosque:

  • Fabricated conservative outrage: In 2006, @GlennBeck Praised “Ground Zero Mosque” Imam Rauf [Oliver Willis]
  • Jihad! [Bob Cesca] — exactly what fundamentalist Christians want: a Holy War — bring on the #Rapture!

Obama:

  • The Clark Griswold president? CBS’s Mark Knoller, the unofficial keeper of such things, said Obama has taken 48 days off since his inauguration. At this point in Bush’s presidency, he’d taken 155 days off. [Bob Cesca]
  • In the past week, Obama’s approval has hit a new low: “it now stands at 42 percent, virtually identical to Reagan’s in August 1982.” [WaPo]

Misc:

  • Paul Krugman observes Bush tax cuts will give $3 million EACH to the richest 120,000 people [Krugman]
  • What’s Wrong With Wingnuts: (1) Paul-tarded economics (2) declare holy war (3) criminalize science [Matt Osborne]
  • Fox News scrubbing Wikipedia entry on their $1 Million donation to GOP [DaillyKos]
  • Dick Armey leader of Freedomworks says Medicare and Social Security need to be ended [JoeWo]
  • Conservatives hate Socialism – except when they love Socialism [ThinkProgress]

News:

  • New rules designed to protect credit card users from “unreasonable late payment and other penalty fees” come into force Sunday as a result of the Wall Street reform bill. [CNN]
  • Chile: miners alive but rescue may be MONTHS away [CSMonitor]
  • Half-billion bad eggs, more could be recalled: FDA to aggressively investigate salmonella outbreak that has sickened 1,300 [MSNBC]

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John Boehner: I don’t need to see GDP numbers or to listen to economists

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Think Progress:

The GDP numbers that Boehner doesn’t want to see showed a relatively weak 2.4 percent growth rate in the 2nd quarter, which indicates that the economy is losing momentum:

MW-AF692_econom_MD_20100730085435

The consensus from leading experts is that the original stimulus was too small for the magnitude of the crisis. Forty notable economists and historians, including Joseph Stiglitz, Alan Blinder, and Mark Zandi, recently signed their names to statements calling for more government stimulus. “The urgent need is for government to replace the lost purchasing power of the unemployed and their families and to employ other tax-cut and spending programs to boost demand,” they wrote.

Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke — who Boehner has praised in the past — has said that deficit spending is critical in the short-term and that pulling support from the stimulus isn’t the right solution. “At the current moment…the large deficits, as unattractive as they are, are important for supporting economic activity, and they were important also in restoring financial stability,” he said. “And so I think they were justified in that respect, and I would be reluctant to withdraw that support too precipitously in the near term.”

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf — yet another expert that Boehner has praised in the past — has explained that there is “no intrinsic contradiction” between supporting more stimulus now and demanding deficit reduction later. Yale economics professor Robert Schiller writes in today’s New York Times, “We need more stimulus, not less — but we need to focus much more on actually putting people to work. … [U]nless we take new measures, we face the prospect of protracted unemployment.”

MOAR stimulus!

Of course if the economy was to turn around with more stimulus money, that would be bad for the GOP. There’s no way they’ll take a chance on losing seats in Congress like that. So instead they’ll argue to extend the tax cuts!

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