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Republicans are attacking Harry Reid for not bringing enough stimulus money to Nevada. I'm confused—I thought Republicans thought that stimulus money was bad. Shouldn't they think that this is a good thing?
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779 people have been imprisoned at Guantanamo. Three have been convicted of a crime. That's a .4% success rate.
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0.4%, not 4%.
Wow, I didn’t just get that wrong—I got it wrong by an order of magnitude. :) Thanks, Roger!
The author of the piece in the Atlantic was disingenuous. The Rs would vote for pretty much any bill that paid for UI with spending cuts. Harry Reid knows this. He could pass a bill to extend UI tomorrow if he wanted to.
But he doesn’t want to. He’s playing politics, and you’re just upset because the Rs are throwing it back in his face.
I’ve never understood “playing politics” as an accusations leveled against politicians. One might as well accuse baseball players of “playing baseball.”
More to the point, no, I’m annoyed because this is straight-up hypocritical, and in a classic Republican way: pork is bad, unless it’s our pork. That’s the same argument here. Stimulus money is evil…and we demand more of it. Bullshit.
As an aside, of all the things government spends money on, unemployment insurance is among the most efficient as a means of stimulating the economy during periods of poor economic performance — every dollar spent on UI generates an additional $1.61 of private sector economic growth according to an independent study by Moody’s Analytics. For comparison’s sake, Moody’s study showed that extending the Bush tax cuts would yield only $0.32 in economic growth. If cutting taxes for the wealthy is “trickle down” economics, unemployment insurance is garden hose economics.
I mention it because it can be tempting at first blush to think of unemployment insurance as “pork,” but in actuality we’re not talking about bridges to no where or wall street bail-outs here. This is the rare bill that everyone can find a reason to support for reasons wholly divorced from political- or self-interest. Like feeding poor people? Extend UI. Like improving the climate for small business? Extend UI.
Unless you cut spending in defense. But anything else is fair game.
–Or pork in their home-district.
Or Medicare or social security.
Or really anything that’s popular with voters. But cutting foreign aid would work!
–Unless it’s to Israel.
Although I don’t have the figures handy, military, defense and intelligence are some of the least return on taxpayer money spent.
It is unfortunate then that billions of dollars of stimulus money is going to a bloated, mismanaged enterprise. The Washington Post article is and will continue to be a real eye-opener in terms of this intelligence industrial complex we’re paying for.
For Ben and Mark…
I see that image linking is turned off. Fair enough.
http://media.sfexaminer.com/images/100720beelertoon_c.jpg