Back to Parsing Words and what the Economic Stimulus Really Means

I think the day has come to define the difference between and emergency economic stimulus bill and pork barrel spending. During President Obama's weekly radio address he highlighted several key points to his plan:

• Double within three years the amount of energy obtained from renewable resources.
• Upgrade 10,000 schools and improve learning for about 5 million students
• Save 2 billion dollars by making federal buildings more energy efficient
• Triple the number of undergraduate and graduate fellowships in science
• Tighten security at 90 major ports.

All of these plans have merits on their own but none of these will stimulate our economy. Let me make my point clearer, tightening security at our ports might be a good thing, increasing science fellowships might be a good thing, investing in renewal energy might be a good thing, but none will provide an economic stimulus that is needed immediately.

Maybe we could use a little transparency on President Obama's intentions. These are projects that President Obama has wanted since the day he has started campaigning, but he is putting an "economic stimulus" cloak on them in the hopes that people would support this because we are in such serious economic trouble and no one would notice.

The Presidents claims that his infrastucture programs will alone create 600,000 new jobs. That should be comforting to the 5,000 employees Microsoft laid off yesterday. They may be able to get jobs paving streets.

Mr. President let me give you some ideas on what would have an immediate impact on our economy:

• Reduce taxes on corporations by a third. That would still be nearly twice as much as corporations in Ireland pay.
• Do a two year furlough on capital gains taxes. With the huge losses we have seen in the past few months no one is going to have capital gains anyhow.
• Since the unemployment roles have nearly doubled in the past year do you think that maybe a time for an aggressive job training program? Duh.
• Allow people to dip into to their 401k savings without penalty taxes to get caught up on their bills.
• Repeal many of the SOX compliancy regulations that prevent companies from upgrading information systems.

President Obama ends his address by telling the American people "It's a plan that will save or create 3 to 4 million jobs over the next few years." Are we back to a time when we are going to parse every word that a President says? Save or create? What does that mean? We may have 10% unemployment but he can take credit for saving 4 million jobs that would have been lost had he not been there to help us?

Mr. President your plan is an $800 billion pork barrel!