"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel
The 647-page, $825 billion House legislation is being sold as an economic "stimulus"...
The larger fiscal issue here is whether this spending bonanza will become part of the annual "budget baseline" that Congress uses as the new floor when calculating how much to increase spending the following year, and into the future. Democrats insist that it will not. But it's hard -- no, impossible -- to believe that Congress will cut spending next year on any of these programs from their new, higher levels. The likelihood is that this allegedly emergency spending will become a permanent addition to federal outlays -- increasing pressure for tax increases in the bargain. Any Blue Dog Democrat who votes for this ought to turn in his "deficit hawk" credentials.
This is supposed to be a new era of bipartisanship, but this bill was written based on the wish list of every living -- or dead -- Democratic interest group.
read the WSJ article
My thoughts: Let's politicize an economic crisis with pork. Change you can believe in.
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