The New York Times is reporting that the House and Senate are close to reaching a deal on a final version of the stimulus plan, even ahead of the Conference Committee. The Times reports that there is $789 billion in tax cuts and spending. It’s too early to say what exactly is in the bill, the Times says the ridiculous car-purchase tax breaks and home-purchase tax loans have been “sharply reduced”. I’d say this is an improvement as long as transportation isn’t cut, since much of what is in the bill will not stimulate the economy and isn’t really worth putting into law.
Not everyone’s happy:
Some critics also suggested that the final figure was too small to be effective because of the grave condition of the American economy.
“I am not happy with it,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa. “You are not looking at a happy camper. I mean, they took a lot of stuff out of education. They took it out of health, school construction and they put it more into tax issues.”
Mr. Harkin said he was particularly frustrated by the money being spent on fixing the alternative minimum tax. “It’s about 9 percent of the whole bill,” he said, “which we were going to do later this year in a tax bill. Why is it in there? It has nothing to do with stimulus. It has nothing to do with recovery. This makes no sense whatsoever.”
He’s right. The economy is in much more serious trouble than it looks on the surface, and it looks really damned scary on the surface. The problem is this stimulus has too little that will actually stimulate the economy, too much that won’t stimulate the economy, too much that takes too long, and too much that shouldn’t be done at all. But at least it has some of the things that we want done, somethings that will be quick, and won’t entirely be spend on bad projects. Hopefully it will help shore up the economy, but I don’t expect it to do all that much.
I pray the President and Congress will take a look at the “low-hanging fruit” in our passenger rail systems in upcoming bills.
It has rarely been the funding that’s been the issue with transit building, it’s the process involved in getting the funding. Change the process and funding might not matter as much.
I believe you have it backwards : the process is like that because of the lack of funding. You have to jump through dozens of hoops because the FTA has to really really know you’re going to spend the money on a good project, since it has so little money to give out.
Oh, the government has never had a problem with apportioning larger chunks for transit projects, but they changed the criteria so they wouldn’t have to. It’s the reverse of what happened with the UMTA.
Right. Both need to be improved. They need more than $1.2 billion a year for new starts, and to take down a lot of the hurdles in the way of giving the money
Ugh. Tax cuts for cars? I agree with tax cuts on green cars but what about tax cuts for people who don’t even have a car and walk or use transit??