2/23/09 - How to spend the stimulus in NJ?
New Jersey Biz magazine recently asked two legislators --- Democrat Senator Barbara Buono and our own Assemblyman Vince Polistina --- how they would spend the federal stimulus money in New Jersey.
The different responses from both legislators is striking.
Check it out here.
2/8/09 - Big government isn't the answer to get the economy moving
President Barack Obama has thrown his call for bipartisanship to the wind and is now blaming Republicans for lack of action on his spending bill a/k/a stimulus package.
He reminds us that the Democrats won the election last year. And that implies in it that Republicans should abandon all of their principles --- belief in entrepreneurship, empowering working families and inherent distrust of government bureaucracy --- and sign-on to the Obama spending free for all.
But the President's Democratic Party controls the House and the Senate. If he wants action, he should get it. Its not necessary to make Republicans complicit in his expansion of the size of the federal government --- particularly when its not even clear that the Obama spending bill will actually create new jobs and there's a significant amount of waste.
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”
That's what FDR's Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. said after eight years of the New Deal. That greatest of social experiments failed to reduce unemployment --- in fact unemployment increased through the 1930s.
Two professors recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the New Deal may very well have prolonged the Great Depression, rather than ended it.
Let's not make that same mistake again by spending billions in tax dollars, saddling our children with deeper debt and having nothing to show for it.
2/3/09 - Me me meeeeee!
You have to wonder if Senator Jeff Van Drew wakes up in the morning and sings "me me me" to get his vocal chords warmed up.
Yesterday, Senator Van Drew tried to get legislation through the State Government Affairs Committee to have four different state odes to New Jersey approved as the official state songs.
In his constant attempt to be everything to everyone, this time the Senator's legislative maneuvering fell flat.
Fellow Democrat Senator Loretta Weinberg said: "We have a lot of other issues to deal with, so can we just put this aside until we can get our economic problems taken care of?"
For some reason Senator Van Drew wasn't available for comment in today's Press of Atlantic City story.
Maybe he was too busy auditioning for the new season of American Idol.
1/27/09 - Key Democrat rips stimulus package
A key Democrat on the House Capital Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises Subcommittee, today said that the Democrats' stimulus package is moving too quickly through Congress and will do nothing to stimulate the economy in the short term.
Details here on The Hill.
1/11/09 - Obama uses recession as pretext to grow the size of government
The national recession we now find ourselves in is being used by the incoming Obama Administration as a pretext to grow the size of government.
President-elect Obama is proposing over $700 billion in government spending and incentives to help mitigate the economic downturn.
But the question is whether this injection of government dollars will actually help the economy or just add to the federal deficit and grow the size of the federal government.
The conclusion of N. Gregory Mankiw in the New York Times today is that Obama's stimulus package will not have that great of an effect on the economy and that those in Washington pushing the plan are still hung up on a by-gone Great Depression/Keynesian mindset to spend record amounts of money on government programs -- leaving trails of deficits and higher taxes to pay for it.
If you thought the federal bailout of Wall Street was an outrage, wait until you see this sausage being made.
It appears the tax-spend-borrow mindset of Jon Corzine is coming to Washington, even though Corzine was passed over as President-elect Obama's Treasury Secretary.
The only saving grace is that Obama may opt for more tax cuts than originally anticipated. The questions is whether Obama can resist liberal Democrats in Congress who are skeptical of tax cuts when they can spend, spend, spend.
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