WSJ: Only 12% of stimulus bill is stimulus

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WSJ: Only 12% of stimulus bill is stimulus

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | Misc |

Wall Street Journal - 40-Year Wish List: You won’t believe what’s in that stimulus bill:

In selling the plan, President Obama has said this bill will make “dramatic investments to revive our flagging economy.” Well, you be the judge. Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There’s another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.

Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, 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. And even many of these projects aren’t likely to help the economy immediately. As Peter Orszag, the President’s new budget director, told Congress a year ago, “even those [public works] that are ‘on the shelf’ generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy.”

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?

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3 Comments to WSJ: Only 12% of stimulus bill is stimulus

SayUncle » Stimulus bill
January 29, 2009

[...] to have passed the house. Probably a done deal. But only 12% is actually, you know, stimulus. The rest is [...]

Jules
February 1, 2009

There’s almost no content in this article! This is just a way of lambasting anyone who doesn’t agree with the Republican Way of stimulating … the Way that failed so dramatically last year.

Les Jones
February 1, 2009

There’s plenty of content. Not sure what you’d prefer to see.

I agree that the practice of writing checks to taxpayers was a dumb way to stimulate the economy and that it failed. Said so here.

Even that beats a this pork barrel stimulus package. $50 million to the National Endowment for the Arts? Yeah, that’ll really get America working again.