I’ve been silent on this issue, watching it play out but I can no longer contain myself. Have we learned nothing from the failures of the past 8 years? Apparently not. Incredibly disappointing.

1. Tax Credits Don’t Work – How many hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted on tax credits? What exactly have they done? Nothing. 1/3 of the current stimulus package is tax cuts.
2. Stimulus isn’t an excuse – To throw in every policy change ever desired in the past eight years and fund it. While there are many noble ideas and worthwhile investments, wrong time, wrong place, wrong bill. It’s inviting partisan politics into the living room. Shame on you Democrats.
3. Snipers aren’t welcome – Zero. Zilch. Nada. That’s how many Republicans are supporting a stimulus package in the House. Their ideas? Give more tax breaks to their rich buddies and continue to screw the tax payer. Um, fellas, get a friggin’ clue!
4. Wrong Infrastructure! – In the Great Depression, infrastructure investment served to bring the country out of its misery slowly. The same thing is possible now – and we should invest in repair of bridges, roads, schools, water systems, etc. BUT that’s not the infrastructure that will take us forward into the next century….
5. Saving the wrong people – As a tax payer (and a big one at that) I want the people who are a) paying their bills b) suffered loss of employment c) are a risk of losing their homes and lives to be the PRIMARY beneficiaries of bailout money. They’ve earned the right for a second chance. Where exactly is that first $350B we allowed the government to reinvest in irresponsible bankers?
6. Arbitrarily limiting pay is stupid – Having reamed the bankers, I’ll now come to their defense. Now that we “own” these banks, I think we should have pay packages with short- mid- and long- term incentives available to the workforce aligned with the public interest. Who cares if they get stinky rich as long as the public good has been served? That’s the American Way. Want to lose the best talent? Limit the upside to their pay arbitrarily…It will doom these institutions to fail as the talent runs to unregulated industries.

So, what SHOULD we do? Keep government involvement to a minimum where business decisions are necessary. Invest in our energy distribution infrastructure, invest in getting fiber optic connections to each home, invest in education to transform manufacturing workers to knowledge workers, invest in biofuel development from non-food bio-sources, provide long-term tax incentives and finance guarantee to renewable electricity power developers, provide incentives for bridging the digital divide, we should have a non-exclusive “buy American” clause in the stimulus (why should we send more $ to China for steel?) and we should aggressively invest in our rapidly deteriorating physical infrastructure. Why is this so friggin’ hard for these dim bulbs to see?

And since we’re mucking about in investment and revenue, on a national basis, we should introduce HR2 (not stimulus) to revoke the tax exempt status for organizations with more than $250k in income or $500k in assets to create another substantial revenue stream to fund some of these initiatives without increasing the tax burden on individuals or legitimate businesses.

Government: Get a Clue! Get Busy! Quit screwing around!

(See, I told you I was stimulated….)