| Columnist Ben Stein has taken a close
look at President Barack Obama's proposed $820 billion stimulus package, and
made some eye-opening discoveries.
Writing for Spectator.com and NYPost.com, Stein calculates that:
The House of Representatives debated the bill for eight hours, or
roughly $102 billion per hour.
Only 10 percent of the stimulus funds would be spent in 2009.
Almost half of the $820 billion would end up in the pockets of
Democratic-controlled unions, such as the Service Employees International
Union, and federal, state, and municipal employee unions.
At 680 pages long, neither Obama nor any member of the House had
enough time to read the entire bill before the House voted. (Comment: What
do we send these people to Washington for? Should we trust them when they
sign blank checks?)
The $820 billion would be enough to give every unemployed American
$75,000.
Says Stein: "There has been pork-barrel politics since there has been
politics, but the scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been imagined
before -- and no one can be sure it will actually do much stimulation. ...
This has been a punch in the solar plexus to the kind of responsible,
far-seeing, mature government processes that are needed to protect America."
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