The biggest earmark in American history is going to a “green” initiative in Obama’s home state of Illinois.

President Obama is earmarking $1 billion in Stimulus money “to build FutureGen 2.0, a clean coal repowering program and carbon dioxide (CO2) storage network” in his home state of Illinois.  …

The Department of Energy projects 1,900 jobs as a result of $1,000,000,000 in new spending.  This works out to $526,315.79 of your tax dollars spent per job.  A half million dollars per job seems to be a bad deal for the taxpayer. Of more concern to the taxpayer, Senator Tom Coburn believes this project to be more about bringing home pork to Illinois than providing stimulus to average Americans.

Stunning, even given the vast hubris of the man that once said:

Absolutely, we need earmark reform. And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.

Technorati Tags: Earmarks, Another Broken Obama Promise, Ignoring Small Business, Jobless Recovery and Other Myths, Stimulus and Other Government Lies, Bankrupting America, Declining Jobs in America, Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice, Obama the Amatuer

Rasmussen finds that only 25 percent of likely voters think the financial bailouts were a good idea. A full 56% think they were out-and-out a bad idea. [Note: the 19% who are still undecided on the issue should have their voter registration cards taken away. How can you not have an opinion on this vital issue by now?

Unsurprisingly, political insiders don’t share this view:

There also continues to be a strong divide between the Political Class and Mainstream voters. While a strong majority of Mainstream voters are still against both of the bailouts, at least half of the Political Class think they were a good idea.

This dichotomy is supported by a recent Politico poll:

Only 27 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction, compared with 61 percent who think the nation is on the wrong track. Likewise, when asked whether the national economy is heading down the right or wrong track, just 24 percent chose the right track, compared with 65 percent for the wrong track.

Yet among the 227 Washington elites polled, more think the country is on the right track, 49 percent, than the wrong track, 45 percent. On the economy, 44 percent of elites think the country is on the right track, compared with 46 percent who believe it is not.

Politico also found that compared to mainstream Americans, the political elites were more supportive of Obama, less supportive of Palin, and tended to think of the Tea Party movement as a “fad”. And that’s just sad.

Further, a Bloomberg poll shows that 7 out of 10 Americans see even more joblessness and an increasing deficit, believing that the country is mired in recession.

Seven of 10 Americans say reducing unemployment is the priority. At the same time, the public is skeptical of the Obama administration’s stimulus program and wary of more spending, with more than half saying the deficit is “dangerously out of control.”

If Obama’s “stimulus” had actually created jobs instead of rewarding failure, the recession might be in the rear view mirror and public opinion would be much different. Instead, 70 percent think the economy is still in recession and 13 percent think we are headed for a double-dip. Meanwhile, real unemployment hovers just short of 22 percent.

Amity Shlaes compares today’s economy with that of 1932, the end of Hoover’s presidency and just when things started getting better. She notes that although there are factors that differenciate the two, there are a number of similarities. Read the whole thing, but here’s the money quote:

The takeaway from 1932? Resetting the euro’s criteria for existence and member countries’ obligations when it comes to bailing out one another should happen sooner rather than later. Democrats and the president should ignore unions and cut trade deals with Latin America. John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, supported tax cuts. Obama can too, or at least block rate increases. The president might also want to suppress his lawyer- Keynesian reflexes and reconsider policy when it comes to wages. But the 1932 crisis talk actually impedes such consideration.

If anyone believes that these can take place in today’s partisan environment just hasn’t been paying attention. Get settled folks, this recession isn’t going away any time soon.

Technorati Tags: Bankrupting America, Bailouts and Other Bad Ideas, Stimulus and Other Failures, Rising Unemployment in America, Unions and Other Drags on the Economy, Political Elites and Other Yammerheads, Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice

Republicans may have woken up:

GOP leaders released a statement announcing their move Wednesday night; they’ll bring the matter to their conference on Thursday.

“We believe the time has come for House Republicans to adopt an immediate, unilateral moratorium on all earmarks, including tax and tariff-related earmarks, and we will support changing the official rules of the House Republican Conference to incorporate such a moratorium when a special conference meeting on the matter takes place Thursday,” the GOP leaders said in the statement.

“When Republicans take back the House, we will rein in out-of-control federal spending and bring fundamental change to the process by which Congress spends American taxpayers’ money.”

Promises, promises.

If Republicans had acted like conservatives when they already had control of Congress (and the White House) then they wouldn’t have lost it all in the first place. And we wouldn’t be trillions in debt with double-digit unemployment. But noooo!

Term limits. That’s all I’m saying.

Technorati Tags: GOP Promises, Republicans Acting Like Conservatives, Rising Unemployment, Ballooning National Debt, Destruction of the American Economy, Barack Hussein Obama the Dangerous Choice

I particularly like the part of how taxpayers are subsidizing farmers who make more than the average American family.

From CATO:

HT to NetRightNation.

The Tax Foundation’s 2007 Tax Foundation analysis of federal, state and local taxes and government spending for 1991 through 2004.

We find households in the lowest quintile of income received roughly $8.21 in federal, state and local government spending for every dollar of taxes paid in 2004, while households in the middle quintile received $1.30, and households in the top quintile received $0.41. Overall, tax payments exceeded government spending received for the top two quintiles of income, resulting in a net fiscal transfer of between $1.031 trillion and $1.527 trillion between quintiles. Both taxes and spending appear to have large distributional effects on households, and these effects have grown since 1991. The results suggest tax distributions alone are an inadequate measure of progressivity, and policymakers should examine both tax and spending distributions when judging the overall fairness of policy toward income groups.

Sound fair? No, I didn’t think so. Wanna know which quintile your household fits into?

If you can’t read the whole thing, check out the executive summary. A couple of charts I extracted really bring things home:

As we’ve seen above, government taxes and spending redistribute between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion between the five quintiles of household income each year. This fact is not apparent by looking at the tax system alone. For this reason, it’s important for Americans to look beyond the distribution of only taxes and start counting government spending received as well. Only by counting both can we give an accurate judgment about what government policies are doing for different income groups in America.

To show just how big “Big Government” has become, the Tax Foundation says that the the $3.5 trillion of total government spending about 30 percent of the 2004 U.S. economy, which is larger than the combined GDP of Canada, Mexico, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary and New Zealand in 2004.

How did we let this happen?

Everyone knows that taking a trip to California is taking a risk of being caught in an earthquake. So why do 86 percent of the state’s homeowners have no quake insurance?

In the San Francisco Bay area, where geologists project a 62 percent probability of a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake in the next 26 years, Hurricane Katrina has had a dual effect on homeowners.

Some Californians called their insurance agents and signed up for quake coverage. But for many others, the billions of dollars in federal aid pouring into the Gulf Coast merely bolstered a sense that the government would come to the rescue after a big earthquake.

In the insurance industry this mind-set is jokingly known as the “Air Force One Solution” – the notion that the president would surely fly over a disaster zone dropping $100 bills from his plane.

When did it become my responsibility to subsidize the ability of a moonbat to live in California?

Technorati Tags: FEMA,
California Quakes,
Katrina.

Members of the Democrat’s Progressive Caucus are proposing the diversion of $60 billion dollars to “humanitarian assistance, social programs, energy conservation, homeland security and deficit reduction.”

Isn’t that great! I applaud the sentiment. The over-the-top spending by this congress has been shameful. It’s about time someone did something about the pork.

Wait. What’s that? There’s not one word about reducing pork? Not a thought towards cutting waste? Nothing that addresses fighting fraud? The “common sense budget” is as bloated as the one we have now, they’re just redirecting the spending? Where’s the money to come from?

Where else: the military budget.

So much for Raptors or armored Humvees. We don’t need them in the liberal world.

And where would we spend it?

The large amount allocated for humanitarian assistance could be used in such places as the Darfur region of Sudan, Woolsey said. Pelosi and other House Democrats recently met with the Save Darfur Coalition, a group of religious and humanitarian groups.

They’re setting aside more for Darfur than the next largest cause: modernizing American schools.

Yeah, that’ll resonate with the heartland in an election year. Who’s in charge over there?

Update: Conservative Republicans (I’m glad to hear that there are some left) are going to release their own budget proposal, only this one really tries to cut the budget.

Senior aides say the conservatives’ plan would wring about $350 billion from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs and save $300 billion partly through a major reorganization of the Education, Commerce and Energy Departments.

“We are putting our money where our mouth is,” said one of the officials, who would discuss the proposal only without being identified because it was still being prepared for release Wednesday by leaders of the Republican Study Committee.

Technorati Tags: Budget,
Liberal Causes,
Leftists, Liberals and Other Silliness,
Conservative Causes.

The Club for Growth blog has a copy of the Senate pork request form. My favorite part is where it asks the requester to “be realistic” when listing the project priorities.

A realistic Senator? What next, we should believe in the Easter Bunny?

I am usually horrified by the actions of any federal appointee that is put in charge of a single initiative. Perhaps it’s the horrid record run up by our “experts”: the threats to privacy advocated by Bush’s health information czar, the ineffectiveness of the cybersecurity czars, the long line of failures by one drug czar after another.

Besides, I’ve not seen a czar come up with anything besides new and creative ways to spend taxpayer money.

But in the case of New Orleans, the federal monies have already been allocated so there’s nothing to do except see that they aren’t misspent. Instead, we are leaving the spending in the hands of politicians from the most corrupt city in America — who are evidently also the most incompetent:

The city’s official blueprint for redevelopment after Hurricane Katrina, to be released on Wednesday, will recommend that residents be allowed to return and rebuild anywhere they like, no matter how damaged or vulnerable the neighborhood, according to several members of the mayor’s rebuilding commission.

Worse yet, areas that don’t attract a “critical mass of residents” will be allowed to return to marshland and the people that have rebuilt there (at considerable taxpayer expense, no doubt) will be “forced to leave”.

Though such a requirement would be emotionally wrenching, the commission will propose a buyout program to compensate those people at the market price before Hurricane Katrina, but it is not clear whether there will be federal financing for such a program.

Do you have any doubts as to where the financing will come from? And how much of the money will be diverted into certain pockets along the way?

When it comes to new and creative ways to spend our money I have to give first prize to those who run New Orleans.

Technorati Tags: New Orleans,
Reconstruction Czar.

John Fund gives us an interesting statistic: Federal largesse now exceeds $22,000 per household.

Every citizen believes federal spending is out of control. Conservatives are outraged that their party has the majority and continue to “spend like drunken sailors”. Liberals are outraged that cuts being proposed are for domestic programs rather than decreasing military spending.

Of the recent House legislation to reduce the budget by $51 billion dollars, the Libertarian think tank CATO sent this out in their Daily Dispatch:

Only by the pretzel logic of Washington can this bill be considered a “cut.” Here’s what’s really going to happen: Spending will still grow, but only slightly slower. Instead of spending a total of $7.8 trillion in entitlement programs over the next five years, the GOP proposes to spend $7.75 trillion. That’s a total difference of 0.6 percent. This is not starving the beast. This isn’t even a tummy rumble.

But CATO ignores the difficulties involved. Just because Republicans have a majority does not mean that conservatives are in control. This case was eloquently made by Representative Marsha Blackburn in her weekly newsletter just before the vote:

We’re just about to begin debate on the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. I will tell you that this will be a very tight vote. We have 20 or so Republicans who have not supported these very reasonable reductions in government growth and spending and almost every single Democrat has opposed them. Some have called our effort to slow the growth of Medicaid in this bill from 7.3% to 7.0% a cut — so you can see what we’re up against. Only in Washington would a 0.3% reduction in growth be called a cut!

We’re talking about $53.9 billion in reductions over several years in a yearly budget of $2.4 trillion. I believe we should go even further in reducing spending, but we’ll find out shortly if there is any support from across the aisle to join us in that effort.

I’m including both some background information on the legislation, and an article I wrote with Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina asking the Democratic Blue Dog Coalition to support the bill. The Blue Dogs are House members who talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, but have done little to demonstrate they mean what they say. We hope they’ll support this bill.

Note that the Blue Dogs did not support the spending reductions and a number of “Republicans” voted against it!

It is not enough to put a Republican in office, we must elect conservatives. Conservatives that know about fiscal responsibility. Conservatives that will take the side of the taxpayer and not side with the Democrat party.

Give up on the GOP if you wish — Republican is a meaningless label. But do not give up on conservatives. Support and vote the man, not the party.

As an aside, I’ll make another endorsement of the Club for Growth, an organization that identifies fiscal conservatives and asks members to support them. Marsha Blackburn was endorsed by the Club and she has done us proud.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the Club for Growth or CATO other than being a member of both organizations.

BTW, Marsha does a bang-up job of utilizing electronic media to communicate to her constituency (and the rest of the world). In addition to her frequent newsletters, she has blogged at RedState.org and is a guest blogger at Bill Hobbs place this week (in spite of a bad case of bronchitis!).