CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, February 16, 2009

Stimulatus porkus: The ObamaNation

In March of 2008, the IRS said it was sending out stimulus checks to everyone who filed federal income tax returns. The IRS defined “everyone” as just over 130 million taxpayers. In July, 2008, the CIA’s World Fact Book estimated the number of people residing inside the U.S. at 304 million. Apparently, a lot of folks do not file federal income returns.

Now, almost a year later, the Democrat-controlled Congress is borrowing $787 billion dollars from U.S. taxpayers and their children and grand children. Most of that money will be spent on the government agencies and the greedy speculators who got us into the current economic mess.

Of the $787 billion, only $150 billion will go toward repairing or improving our decaying national infrastructure. This reminds one of Benny Hill’s famous saying, “I spent almost all me money on wine, women and song. The rest, I just threw away.”

Many calculators can’t display the number of zeros required to work with 787 billion. But if we divide $787 billion by 130,000,000 taxpayers, that’s $6,053. If, instead of doing a Benny Hill with that $787 billion, what if every taxpayer were to receive a tax-free check of $6,053?

What would you do with $6,053? If you put it in a savings institution like a bank or savings and loan, that institution would have more money to loan out to car buyers, to businesses, and to make home loans. To do all that, not one additional government employee would need to be hired. Not one new government agency would need to be created.

Let’s say you do not put the $6,053 into savings. It could be used toward a new car, to make home improvements, to pay off debt (thereby, helping to clear up the books of troubled lenders), to buy health insurance, to ease the burden of junior’s college education, to take a vacation, to spur the lagging economy in all sorts of ways. Again, not one additional employee or government agency would be needed.

Of course, that is not what is going to happen. The stimulus package merely stimulates the growth of government, adds government employees and increases government oversight of what you and I do. It even says your medical records are open to government employees who will then decide what health care you can receive and when you can receive it.

Go to: www.readthestimulus.org. There, you can see that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gets $30 million to improve the habitat of the marsh mice in San Francisco Bay. Senate Democrat Leader, Harry Reid, gets $8 billion for a magnetic-levitation, 311-mph, mass-transit line to link California’s Disneyland with his home near Lost Wages, Nevada.

Meanwhile, America’s supposedly most-reformed-minded-government is being master-minded by some rather interesting folks who, unlike you and me, don’t bother to pay their taxes:

House Ways and Means Chairman, Rep. Charles Rangel (D), just admitted that he didn’t report $75,000 in income. New treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, failed to pay thousands of dollars of Social Security and Medicare taxes and even deducted his son’s posh summer camp fees as a dependent-care expense. Nominee for Health and Human Secretary, Tom Daschle, failed to pay $140,000 in taxes. Nancy Killefer, whom Obama wanted as his “performance czar,” failed to pay taxes for her domestic help. Labor Secretary Nominee, Hilda Solis, (who filed a joint return with her husband) has over a dozen liens for property back taxes. After they were exposed, Daschle and Killefer withdrew their names.

Meanwhile, most of the stimulus package will go for additional government overhead. Very little of it will stimulate the economy. What it will stimulate is the number of people who will leave the wealth-creating private sector and seek jobs in the government’s wealth-consuming sector. Once you understand how this ObamaNation works, all of the rest is really pretty simple.

William Hamilton is a syndicated columnist and featured commentator for USA Today. Dr. studied at Harvard’s JFK School of Government and was an assistant professor of history and political science at Nebraska Wesleyan University. ©2009. William Hamilton.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com