MSM Finally Picks Up On Inevitable Porkulus Failure

Oh, hello there, mainstream media. Glad to have you join us after weeks of failing at your job of warning America. Yahoo News finally started to provide front page coverage, gasp, of the miserable disaster that will follow from the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Spending Spree Bill, or Generational Theft Act of 2009 if you prefer.

The $787 billion stimulus package that President Barack Obama signed Feb. 17 adds an estimated $185 billion to the already-record federal deficit for fiscal 2009, pushing it up to about $1.4 trillion . That’s a whopping 10 percent of the gross domestic product, the highest level since the end of World War II.

The measure’s full of projects that Democrats… have sought for years, and it’s questionable whether many of those provide the economy much of a short-term boost.

Even more such projects are included in the next round of legislation, a $410 billion spending plan for the rest of fiscal 2009 that the House of Representatives is to consider Wednesday.

That package would spend about 8 percent more than the same programs got last year, the second biggest annual increase since 1978 for discretionary spending, programs that the government isn’t required to fund, unlike Social Security and Medicare.

Obama pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, but he’s counting on the stimulus to get the economy growing again soon, and some experts call that a risky bet.

“This really doesn’t do much to juice the economy in the short term,” said Brian Bethune , the chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight, an economic consulting firm in Lexington, Mass.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office agreed. It found that only 23 percent of the stimulus would be spent by Oct. 1 , growing to 74 percent by the end of fiscal 2010 a year later.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D- Calif. , on Monday defended the coming spending spree, which includes an estimated 9,000 earmarks, or local projects, said to cost about $5 billion . She called the bill “the unfinished business of last year, when the president refused to address the priorities and needs of the American people.”

The other problem involves the view that Washington isn’t being fiscally responsible long term by focusing so much on the near term. The CBO warns that while the stimulus should boost the gross domestic product by 1.4 percent to 3.8 percent this year and 1.1 percent to 3.3 percent next year, long-term uncertainties loom.

The CBO projects that the GDP in 2015 and beyond will be as much as 0.2 percent smaller than it would have been without the stimulus package, dragged down by financing all the debt that’s being piled up. In addition, noted the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan fiscal research group, the bill will “have a permanent impact on the deficit through higher interest payments on additional public debt.”

The article goes on and on. Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are rolling around like fat pigs getting fatter as they feast on our tax dollars and fueling years of pent up spending spree desires. Pelosi says there at the end that Bush “refused to address” their debt-based spending, but perhaps he simply understood that you can’t debt your way out of debt. Our country is in the hands of fools. Anyone for some tea?

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