Word: stimulus
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Spend for Success Michael Scherer asks "What Happened to the Stimulus?" [July 13]. Why should a project that keeps poor, young people occupied and off the streets be termed "silly?" $620,000 for the renovation of a skateboard park seems a small price to pay for the potential long-term benefits of providing young people with something to do - all parents know that idle kids make trouble. Isn't it rather more shortsighted to spend billions on road-building, thus encouraging even more cars on the roads and creating ever-increasing greenhouse-gas emissions? This seems like a case...
...Australians, spoiled by boom times that fiscal discipline and staunch leadership had delivered over the course of the previous decade, treated themselves to a new pair of shoes when electing Rudd back in late 2007. Great marketing in the purest sense. As a result of flash-in-the-pan stimulus packages, we are saddled now with terrifying, record debt. Rudd has also been lecturing other countries on how to wrestle with global challenges - and perhaps is given a fleeting audience in China and the U.S. But trying to be all things to all people in the end makes you nothing...
...government's defense, the stimulus bill has directed further billions toward clean energy, and the new levels of funding will be higher than anything the industry has ever known. But other nations, especially in Asia, are still beating us. China is reportedly investing up to $660 billion over the next decade in clean energy and research. South Korea is planning to invest close to 2% of its GDP each year, or about $85 billion over five years, in clean tech. And Japan is aiming for a twentyfold expansion in installed solar by 2020. Meanwhile executives in American clean-energy companies...
...White House set this pattern of legislative compromise and public celebration early on. During the debate over the stimulus bill, which passed just weeks after Obama took office, the President and his advisers deferred significantly to Congress to both shape and size the bill. In the end, the legislation was trimmed to $787 billion, with about $70 billion going to a temporary fix of the Alternative Minimum Tax, an annual adjustment with little stimulative impact...
...time, the President did not call for a larger bill, despite warnings from a wide range of economists that more funding would be needed, given the precipitous deterioration of the economy. Now, however, there is a growing sense in the White House that more stimulus is indeed necessary, even though the political environment for further action has soured. "Given what we know now about how sick the economy, it turns out, was getting, probably bigger might have been better," a senior White House official admits. "It was always an issue, of course, of what could you get through Congress." (Read...