Why Federal Tax Dollars are Paying for a Train in Florida

In answer to your question, a little story, and I have to give credit where credit is due... I got this from my brother in an email:

It's a slow day in a little east Texas town. The sun is beating down, and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit......

On this particular day a rich tourist from back east is driving through town. He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.

The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel.

The guy at the Farmer's Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.

The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.

The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town.

No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government is conducting business today.

Wish I knew the author... he is obviously quite astute.

~Finntann~

Uncle Sam in Your Attic

Liberal screamed about government being "In our bedrooms" during the Reagan years.  Well, now we have Obama and Biden in our attics 

"Insulation is sexy," said the president.  Oh, yeah?  Obama has never gotten within 10 feet of the stuff, let alone installed any of it in a sweaty, cramped attic.  He has no idea what it's like to be itching your ass off for weeks on end afterwards...

Democrats:  Lobotomizing Americans one Government Program at a Time

Anyway, according to VP Biden, Americans are just too stupid or too broke to embark on home improvement.  Here are the barriers to weatherization he cites in his report, "Recovery Through Retrofit" [PDF].:

Consumers do not have access to straightforward and reliable information on home energy retrofits

Has he heard of the Internet?  A previous Vice President invented it.  You can look up products and research their prices and energy efficiency ratings.

Homeowners face high upfront costs and many are concerned that they will be prevented from recouping the value of their investment if they choose to sell their home. The upfront costs of home retrofit projects are often beyond the average homeowner’s budget.

No duh...  This is a calculus every homeowner must make.  If you're selling your house, you don't blow money on upgrades that provide no return.

Home Ownership is not for the Stupid
Home improvements are not cheap, so you save up for those big projects, or do it a little at a time.  I spent one year replacing all the windows at the old Silverfiddle homestead.  Every payday I bought one window and installed it because we couldn't afford to do it all at once.

Are there really that many homeowners so stupid they need Obama and Biden to take them by the hand?  If so, they have no business owning a home.

The Trillion Dollar Man

Lee Majors was the $6 Million Dollar Man . A-Rod was on his way to being the first Billion Dollar man before he turned into A-Fraud. Michael Phelps may yet get the title, drunk driving and bong hits notwithstanding.

With economic doom hanging over the free world, President Obama has bravely grabbed the mantle of Trillion Dollar Man.

The Bush era pirates blew a hole in the side of the Treasury and wasted hundreds of billions with their Friends and Family Plan. No wait, that's cell phones. The Bush Administration invented the TARP, an acronym for the Taxpayer A-- Rape Plan. Next came the competing warlord gangs, the Harry Senators on one side and the Pelosicrats on the other, to fight over who gets to loot the leftovers.

Into this aftermath steps President Obama, Transcendent Hero and our first Trillion Dollar Man. He shrewdly hammered out a Solomonic House-Senate compromise that split the difference by giving both sides everything they wanted, to the tune of a trillion dollars.

And now, (No, I didn't clip this from The Onion) he's shifting his concern to the budget deficit...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123457407865686565.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/opinion/14ryan.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

Oooh! It's oh so stimulating!

Stimulus: If I take my hammer and smash it down on your big toe, that's technically a stimulus. I provided an input that elicits a response, "your screaming and yanking your foot away". That in a nutshell is the problem with stimulus, it is not a positive or negative term, it is neutral, (If I tickle you, you laugh).

Economically speaking, the more appropriate term is "incentive". Government induces desired behavior by the offer of reward. For example, telephone companies may compete in the long distance market (the reward) if they allow competition from other companies within their own infrastructure (the desired effect).

The problem with incentives is that they sometime lead to undesirable results due to the subject behaving in an unexpected manner. CEO stock options were initiated as an "incentive" aimed at producing higher and better CEO productivity. The problem was, that as CEO's soon learned, one could induce higher stock prices (the desired effect) through bad business decisions, claim the reward, and bail before the bottom fell out. The long term result being stinking rich (and retired) CEOs, and shaky and unmanageable companies.

Let us take a theoretical example of "economic stimulus" through the use of government spending (admittedly the numbers are completely made up).

The US government implements a $1 Trillion dollar stimulus package along the lines of the old WPA. The project: The maintenance and upgrading of the federal interstate highway system, federal buildings, and the like. We will grant them the same effectiveness as the old WPA in creating 3.3 million jobs paying a "security wage" to the recipients at the going regional rate. We will also grant the same time period of the old WPA of 8 years (1935-1943).

So, the government creates 3.3 million jobs for an 8 year period. The question then becomes what happens when the money and jobs run out? The government through the use of expenditures can only provide economic support while expending funds. The system is not self-sustaining... the government produces an artificial market...withdraw the funding and the whole house of cards comes falling down. Without WWII... we would either still be running the WPA or long since bankrupt (or socialist). The WPA was only made unnecessary by the economic stimulus induced by the war.

If the stimulus undertaken by government simply 'artificially' creates the desired end-state (employment) we are no better off than we are now, in fact we will be worse off, as we will be forced to continue pumping money into the programs established. Government action must be focused on those areas that can produce long-term positive effects in the economy, anything else is just a hand-out.


Think about it.