More Wednesday Stimulus Wingnuttery

Yep, our local Bucks County Courier Times was really in full-on umbrage mode over the stimulus today, as noted here (I can’t recall the exact wording of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s quote that the paper rather sloppily failed to copy to its web version of the editorial, but I have a feeling it has something to do with this - and I also posted here).

And the paper listed six items in particular from Obama’s stimulus to which it took offense, and I’ll do my best to respond accordingly here.

1) $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts to assist struggling museums and galleries.

Here’s a NY Times story about the budgeting proposal, and here are some excerpts from the comments…

Arts infrastructure comprises those things which foster the arts, including funding, physical assets, programmes, groups, organisations and suppliers.

If you have the time, please join in signing the ‘Secretary of the Arts’ (or “Secretary of Culture”) petition here (two hundred fifteen thousand signees so far, and counting…)

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Arts infrastructure is places like Lincoln Center. Look at New York’s upper west side 30 and 40 years out from the creation of Lincoln Center. Lincoln Center is now surrounded by skyscrapers filled with business and households. It was all born from that. This is only one example of many. Look outside the USA at the “arts infrastructure” at the Guggenheim Bilbao. It put Bilbao on the map. The Guggenheim Bilbao turned everything up for that city in Spain. Arts infrastructure is basic. It’s a no brainer.

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In major cities like Los Angeles funding for the arts keeps kids off the streets, out of gangs and helps bring beauty to the concrete jungle in the form of public art murals. (Many of which were painted years ago on freeway walls by talented artists.)

The last administration took away as much funding for the arts as they could without public outcry. The murals in Los Angeles are demoralizing a reminder of this travesty everyday- defaced with graffiti by kids frustrated with the system that let them fall through the cracks.

Let art rise up and our cities shine with the vision of our children’s creativity. Art is urbane, Art is dignity.

And as noted from here…

To get the United States out of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt launched various stimulus programs to get people to back to work, most importantly, from 1935 to 1943, the Works Progress Administration (WPA). As part of the WPA, the Federal Arts Project (FAP) created work for 5,000 of America's best artists who painted murals and posters, sculpted and created more than 225,000 works of art, mainly in state and local government buildings. (Contrast that 225,000 number over eight years with the just 119,000 grants by the NEA over 38 years, and you can get an idea of the scope.)

Here is another item that earned the wrath of the Courier Times...

2) $650 million for additional digital TV conversion coupons.

As noted in this article...

Congress mandated the February 17 switch to digital television, which will affect some 20 million consumers who do not already use the technology. Owners of older television sets receiving over-the-air signals must buy converter boxes, replace their TVs with digital models, or subscribe to satellite or digital cable service.

But the government has said it had run out of $40 discount coupons for consumers to help pay for converter boxes needed to keep their sets from going blank, leading to calls for delaying the analog switch-off and for more money in the economic stimulus package for the program.

And by the way, if you have access to the New York Times and want to read more about what a fiasco the digital conversion became under the 109th Repug Congress in 2005, Gail Collins wrote a great column about that here (the conversion has now been delayed, as noted here).

Continuing...

3) $87 million for expanded family planning services.

Uh, Courier Times Editorial Board? You might want to read this.

Continuing...

4) $400 million for global warming research.

(This request also is noted here.)

Yeah, well, this is partly to undo the damage done by that idiot Michael Griffin; as noted here...

During the tenure of Michael Griffin as Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, cost overruns and delays in the human space flight program and the shifting of NASA’s priorities to satisfy President Bush’s emphasis on planning to send astronauts to Mars went hand in hand with the deterioration of NASA’s program to study Planet Earth—cuts in the agency’s Earth Science budget, the degradation of the satellite-based climate observing system, and even the deletion from NASA’s official mission statement of the idea of protecting our home planet.

Continuing...

5) $600 million to buy new cars for government workers.

Uh, yeah, Courier Times, this is pretty stoo-pid too, isn’t it?

Let’s see, we're building new hybrid vehicles for government workers, right? Well then, let's give the contract to one of the big three and ensure assembly line jobs for awhile (solving one problem), building vehicles with less of a “carbon footprint” (solving another problem). A real “waste,” huh?

Also (from here)…

On the roads, Obama promises one million hybrid cars by 2015. Half of all government vehicles will be hybrids or all electric by 2012 and consumers will be rewarded for buying “advanced vehicles” with 7000 dollars in tax credits. To encourage the carmakers, federal aid to help pay their enormous healthcare obligations will be linked to investment in fuel-efficient vehicles.

Meanwhile, Obama’s National Low Carbon Fuel Standard would cut carbon emissions from vehicle fuels by 10 percent by 2020 and require all new cars to have flex-fuel capacity so they can run on a mixture of gasoline and biofuels.

And funding for new government vehicles is part of that.

Finally…

6) $300 million for increased teacher salaries.

(A note to some of the uninitiated concerning Courier Times editorial content: their favorite targets are Planned Parenthood, teachers unions, and the “Democrat” Party in general, particularly Patrick Murphy over disclosed congressional earmarks. It had been at least four or five days since they’ve written anything bad about teachers, so they were due here.)

This story tells us that, “Obama also wants to create at least 15,000 new teacher and teaching assistant jobs” through stimulus spending. The money for those jobs has to come from somewhere.

See, in addition to helping to put people to work, the stimulus bill is meant to prepare this country for the challenges of competing in a 21st-century economy. I seem to recall Obama coming back to that point over and over again during his campaign, and as long as we have this crisis we need to resolve, why not use it as an opportunity to address a need we would have had to face anyway?

(The editorial also wonders why the stimulus contains funding for Medicaid; the states need help given depleted revenues, people can't work if they're sick and have no coverage...this is a recording.)

I know it’s hard for the Courier Times to understand, but after eight years of profligate waste and fraud from President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History and his pals, the adults are back in charge trying to clean everything up, even if it means “thinking outside the box” as far as the paper's august editorial board is concerned.

And I realize it is incumbent on me to make that case every chance I get. I only wish more members of the current majority political party in this country would do the same thing once in a while.