Officially Scared

So the Senate is set to vote on the $800+B Generational Theft Act - Stimulus Plan to some - and the inks not even in the pen that the President will use to sign the thing into law and Geitner is about to announce TARP II. Which will cost $1.5T, $2T if you count interest.

That's $3T of national debt he's added to us. In his first month in office.

I hated the bailouts last fall. And the irony is that we don't know where the $700B that was spent to stop the implosion to our economy even went. It didn't stop the financial sector from crumbling. It didn't save any jobs. It didn't keep the Dow from falling to 90s levels. And it's taking a Freedom of Information Act to get any information out of the Treasury Department.

From Bloomberg yesterday:

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged up to $5.7 trillion more. The Senate is to vote this week on an economic-stimulus measure of at least $780 billion. It would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.

Only the stimulus bill to be approved this week, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed four months ago and $168 billion in tax cuts and rebates enacted in 2008 have been voted on by lawmakers. The remaining $8 trillion is in lending programs and guarantees, almost all under the Fed and FDIC. Recipients’ names have not been disclosed.

“We’ve seen money go out the back door of this government unlike any time in the history of our country,” Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said on the Senate floor Feb. 3. “Nobody knows what went out of the Federal Reserve Board, to whom and for what purpose. How much from the FDIC? How much from TARP? When? Why?”

I'm going to throw up. $9.7T, all pledged to this economic problem. None of it to programs already in existence. All of it new spending. All of it with no oversight. All of just out the door like confetti. Paper money. Money I will have to pay back. To China. With the sweat off my back and my children's back, and my children's children.

What's worse, no one even knows what's in the bill. Intrepid reports are wading through the mess and finding incredibly scary things ... like this:

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Ladies, ladies, ladies ... if you get up in arms about a judge telling you what to do with your bodies surrounding pregnancy, you should be double more outraged by this. I do not want the federal government (not medically trained people) telling my doctor (medically trained professional) what procedures / drugs / etc. he should be perscribing for me.

Also in the bill is money for more government cars. Golf carts. $1.2B for summer jobs for youth. $412M for CDC headquarters. $750M for computer center in Maryland. $850M for Amtrak (I'm sure on top of what they already get). Read them all.

This is your money they are spending. Money you haven't even made yet. Money you may not even make. Money someone else will have to make.

I also heard that something else that is on the table is taking everyone's IRAs and 401k accounts and rolling that into the Social Security Fund. Not kidding.

I'm waiting for some good news. Any good news. But right now all I'm getting is lies and rhetoric. Obama says economists agree that this is the answer. That's not true. They don't all agree. Obama says this new stimulus will increase jobs and help us today. Not true. The Congressional Budget Office says most of the money won't hit the economy until next year. And what about tomorrow? The CBO says it will harm us in the long haul.

I'm not making any of this up. 62% of Americans want less spending in this bill and more tax cuts.

I guess it all makes sense. 46% voted for the other guy. 46% are the people who pay taxes in this country.

The people that are running things now, either by cheating or by not making enough money, don't pay taxes. So it's really only the 46% who are getting hosed.