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. 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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