Watching TV is apparently critical to rescuing the American economy. Already stuffed into the Democrats’ package is a $650 million bailout—call it the Boob Tube boondoggle—to pay for $650 million worth of digital TV upgrade coupons in the wake of the official, government-mandated transition to digital television next month.
By Michelle Malkin
“The time has come,” President Barack Obama told us in his inaugural address, “to set aside childish things.” He borrowed the line from Corinthians. With the Beltway bread-and-circus show over, President Obama will now get to work on borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from you, your children and your grandchildren for a doomed fiscal stimulus.
As President Obama basked in the inaugural glow, a dark cloud of reality moved in over the Democrats’ $825 billion plan to rescue the economy. The Congressional Budget Office crunched the numbers and concluded that a huge bulk of the federal spending orgy wouldn’t actually kick in until the recession is waning—if not already over.
The CBO analysis showed that “less than half of the $30 billion in highway construction funds detailed by House Democrats would be released into the economy over the next four years” and “less than $4 billion in highway construction money would reach the economy by September 2010,” according to the Associated Press. [Much in Obama stimulus bill won’t hit economy soon, By Andrew Taylor, January 20, 2009] And those are generous time estimates given the reality of molasses-slow bidding and contracting processes—bogged down by the usual weight of political wrangling, racial bean-counting and assorted union grievance-mongering.Just $26 billion out of the $274 billion set aside in the package would reach the economy by the end of the year, the CBO found. That’s a mere 7 percent. Moreover, the AP summed up: “Just one in seven dollars of a huge $18.5 billion investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy programs would be spent within a year and a half.”