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...Maryland. After years of failed attempts by death penalty opponents to bring a repeal bill to a vote in the state legislature, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley is personally sponsoring this year's version, promising that he will fight to have the legislature pass it during the current 90-day session. In his state of the state address last week O'Malley called capital punishment "outdated, expensive and utterly ineffective." (See the top 10 crime stories...
...these measures, some of the tax cuts in the current House and Senate plans are hard to defend. For example, both chambers included a tax credit for first-time home buyers, a classic hair-of-the-dog solution to a crisis with roots in an artificially inflated housing market; the credit wouldn't provide stimulus and it wouldn't point the country in a new direction. Similarly, as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center pointed out, the Senate's $70 billion patch to the alternative minimum tax is "neither timely nor targeted" and "makes no sense as economic stimulus...
...biomedical research or education about STDs or any other programs that sound vaguely liberal and exotic. But biomedical research jobs are real jobs. So are jobs beautifying the Mall and warning teenagers about herpes. So are jobs building and engineering rail lines for Amtrak, regardless of the company's current profitability. Granted, some spending proposals would work faster and better than others. But it's telling that House minority leader John Boehner keeps ridiculing programs to weatherize low-income homes - which would create jobs in a hurry, save poor people money in the long term and reduce energy waste that...
...federal buildings to use less energy would provide jobs now and reduce federal energy costs in the future. By contrast, professor Feldstein's proposal to beef up the military could dramatically increase both our future obligations for pensions and health-care costs for veterans. In general, most of the current proposals (though not all of them) aim to limit the new spending to the next two years...
...even though their costs have gone through the roof. And there's talk of further subsidizing home mortgages that are already tax-deductible, as if the Federal Government hasn't done enough to encourage homeownership (and in the process, it can be argued, help lay the foundation for the current crisis). But Obama has called for an earmark-free stimulus, so the legislation shouldn't have too many embarrassing waterslides, Mafia museums or cranberry subsidies. Instead, Congress would funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to states and various agencies...