Back to the Failed Ways

The so-called emergency stimulus bill which the president will sign tomorrow is not a prescription to jump-start the economy but a massive social engineering spending bill that takes us back to the failed ways of the past by decades. This is a body blow to the America we know, imperiling our children's future and putting us on a path to servitude. While this list was made before the final conference bill, which the Democrats voted on without having read, let us count the ways:

Reversing the 1996 Welfare Reforms, Expanding the Welfare State, The Stealth Health Care Agenda, Bailing Out Irresponsible State Governments, Stimulus Bill Could Incite New Global Trade War, The Limits of Creating Jobs through Infrastructure Spending, 300,000 Jobs for Illegal Immigrants?, Stimulus Funds will Be Used to Let Felons out of Jail, Unprecedented Expansion of the Federal Role in Education, Stimulus Bill Undermines Parental Rights.

Alarm already from overseas, where the promise of the Obama hope and change has been dashed by the Buy America provisions in the bill, which will kill European and world recovery, and eventually our own:

In practice, however, if labour costs do not come down in a recession, then employers are even less willing to hire staff. The US government of the 1930s augmented this error with protectionist tariffs – designed to keep out imports from countries that had not sought to maintain wage rates, regardless of profitability.

Unfortunately, it may be that Obama will indeed leap into the same elephant trap: the president issued an executive order this month requiring federal agencies to put in place agreements that set “wages, work rules and other benefits” when awarding big construction projects. Perhaps this is payback for the unions’ support for Obama during the election. Admittedly the White House has sought to strip out many of the “buy America” clauses that Congress had attached to its stimulus bill, but when the gold-plating of federal contracts reduces any beneficial effect they might have on overall employment rates, we can be certain that the protectionist chorus will then belt out again, fortissimo.

Veronique de Rugy, Reason, gives us a summary of the final bill.