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Sunday, February 01, 2009
Austin Hill :: Townhall.com Columnist
"Booty Call" Will Stimulate Something Other Than The Economy
by Austin Hill
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Will the Dems' health care Christmas Present to America be an improvement or detriment to our health care system?


You did hear about “Booty Call,” didn’t you?

I’ll have a “Booty Call Update,” in seconds. But first, let’s take a look at the disastrous, so-called “economic stimulus bill” making its way through Congress.

What’s not to love about it? Plenty. The bill has little to do with “stimulating the economy,” and lots to do with expanding the size and scope of public welfare programs. Two billion of our tax dollars devoted to Child Care Block Grants. $120 million for the hiring of part time workers at senior citizen’s community centers. $87 billion for Medicaid “family planning services” (contraception). $650 million to “assist” Americans in buying digital TV converter devices.

Forget tax cuts, or added deductions, that might encourage investors to risk their capital in new, job-creating business ventures. This is about your government employing more daycare workers, preventing pregnancy, and protecting you from the hardship and horror of having to pay for your own digital TV converter.

And then, of course, there’s the $335 million allotted for education on sexually transmitted diseases. And yes, part of this effort involves funding for an “educational program” entitled “Booty Call.” We can all imagine what gets stimulated with participation in a “Booty Call” program - - but it is certainly not the economy.

After passage in the House of Representatives (and with no Republican support at all), the bill is now being considered in the Senate, where it is already being met with opposition from the Democratic majority. One of the nay-sayers, Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri said of the bill “whether it is the National Endowment of the Arts or some of the STD funding or contraceptive funding, all we did was just tee up ammunition for the other side to tear this thing down. And I would like to think we are smarter than that. I'm hopeful on the Senate side we will be smarter than that.”

Call me crazy, but it sounds like Senator McCaskill is tacitly admitting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s idea of “economic stimulus” is not smart. I’ll take it a step further and declare it to be dumb.

But Speaker Pelosi was not the only high ranking government official to display a frightening level of economic illiteracy last week. None other than President Obama himself, in an extemporaneous, and not-so-eloquent moment in front of reporters, had another anti-business tirade last Thursday. Ostensibly, he was upset over reports of bonuses being paid to executives who head-up poorly performing companies. Some of these companies had even been recipients of government “bailout funds.” Continued...
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About The Author
Austin Hill is a Talk Show Host At Boise, Idaho's 580 KIDO Radio, and a frequent Guest Host on the Fox Newstalk Radio Network. He is the Author of "White House Confidential: The Little Book Of Weird Presidential History," And Co-Author of the forthcoming title "The Virtues Of Capitalism: A Moral Case For Free Markets" (Northfield/Moody Press, 2010).
 
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Reply # 1
Date: Feb 2, 2009 - 5:22 PM EST
Greyhawk
What you said is pure nonsense. It's total paranoia. No one on the left, except maybe a few lunatics on the way out fringe, believes anything close to what you said.

The goal is not, as all the right wing shocks say, to get people to be dependent on government. The goal is to smooth out some of the hard edges and inequalities in a capitalist system. The goal is not to run the whole economy and tell everyone what to produce and when. No one on the reasonable left wants anything like that. Don't you have some friends or relatives that you can talk to about this? Or are you living in bubble that only receives right wing radio?

And I know the shock jocks like to call it welfare. But it's nonsense because the tax cuts only go to people who worked and made enough of an income to qualify. If you don't work, you don't get a tax cut. That's not welfare.

The goal is to strengthen the middles-class. You might think they're wrong in the way they go about it. You might think that supply side is the way to go, but to assign these sinister motives to them borders on insanity on your part because there is simply no evidence of this.

Personally, I think supply-siders have lost this argument. If you give capital to some company right now, they can't turn it into extra profits because there is a shortage of demand.

The problem in this country is that the wealth has all been flowing to the wealthiest people, and the middle class is tapped out of resources. The economy won't begin to turn around until that situation changes.
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Reply # 2
Date: Feb 2, 2009 - 4:55 PM EST
Reply to Phylo whatever
In no circumstances can a government operate without deficits if they spend more than they take in as revenue. And, under no circumstances, can a population with a limited numbers of workers continue to fund a wasteful and fraudulent government that buys votes by making it more attractive to be on welfare than by working, and in order to do this, they keep expanding the government with more welfare programs with even higher payouts to the recipients, who, for the most part are nothing more than deadbeats. This is what Obama and the mentally ill and corrupt liberal congress is trying to do, and this is what the liberal democrats have been doing since the days of LBJ and his so called Great Society Programs that have already expened over 8 trillion dollars on worthless programs that have destroyed the work ethic in several generations as well as destroyed the traditional American family that used to get a job, get married, have children and live happily ever after. And, this so called War on Poverty program has expanded the numbers of people in poverty, which was the intent to begin with. The socialists have long known that if you destroy morals and turn people into peasants living off the dole, they are easy to control, manipulate, and dominate and as an added bonus, they will vote for you because you promise them even more for nothing. The current Liberals have mastered this technique. Chairman Mao, Lenin and Stalin would be proud of Obama and the Liberal Democrats of the USA.
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