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Obama's Stimulus bill.
Obama's stimulus bill.
I'm a frugal person and always worry about going into debt. Banks soaked up the money from the bail-out and didn't start lending again. I would be against yet another no-strings-attached bail-out.
But this stimulus package is practical.
It provides money for education and schools. An investment in kids is an investment in the future.
It funds laying 3,000 miles of transmission lines for a national electric grid -- remember when our power grid on the east coast went out in 2003? We learned our infrastructure is from the 60s. Bush never did anything about it. This will provide blue collar jobs and put us on a level playing field with countries like China who are building a modern infrastructure now.
And it will guarantee health coverage for people losing their jobs. Anyone here worried about losing their jobs and health insurance? *raises hand*
Health care is practical for the whole country. I used to work for an insurance company. When people don't have health insurance, they don't stop getting sick.
What happens is they go to the emergency rooms at public hospitals -- which is the most expensive care -- but then can't pay. Hospitals eat the costs or else they turn people away. The press (see Sicko) has video and has reported on sick people getting dumped by hospitals in strange neighborhoods. Just... hiring cabs and dropping them off, still in their hospital gowns. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
Beyond the sheer immorality and potential tragedy on the horizon with current job losses, these costs have to go somewhere.
Usually, hospitals eat the costs and pass them along to those who can pay -- employers. With businesses struggling to stay afloat, this is not the time for employer health care costs to suddenly spike. If we can get people who've lost their jobs coverage and continue to support the very, very, very cheap and efficient community health clinics* this will protect businesses from indirectly shouldering the health care costs of the expanding unemployed.
I don't know everything in this bill. But what I do know of it, we need.
* These are cheaper because they focus on smaller health problems, long term health maintenance, and rely heavily on nurse practitioners.
ETA: Conservatives insist that a proper stimulus package usually has tax cuts, mostly aimed at businesses. They don't like that this is a spending bill.
We tried that already. Bush gave good tax cuts. Everyone I know who owned stock in the last eight years made a mint. Everyone else? "Let them eat cake."
I'm a frugal person and always worry about going into debt. Banks soaked up the money from the bail-out and didn't start lending again. I would be against yet another no-strings-attached bail-out.
But this stimulus package is practical.
It provides money for education and schools. An investment in kids is an investment in the future.
It funds laying 3,000 miles of transmission lines for a national electric grid -- remember when our power grid on the east coast went out in 2003? We learned our infrastructure is from the 60s. Bush never did anything about it. This will provide blue collar jobs and put us on a level playing field with countries like China who are building a modern infrastructure now.
And it will guarantee health coverage for people losing their jobs. Anyone here worried about losing their jobs and health insurance? *raises hand*
Health care is practical for the whole country. I used to work for an insurance company. When people don't have health insurance, they don't stop getting sick.
What happens is they go to the emergency rooms at public hospitals -- which is the most expensive care -- but then can't pay. Hospitals eat the costs or else they turn people away. The press (see Sicko) has video and has reported on sick people getting dumped by hospitals in strange neighborhoods. Just... hiring cabs and dropping them off, still in their hospital gowns. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
Beyond the sheer immorality and potential tragedy on the horizon with current job losses, these costs have to go somewhere.
Usually, hospitals eat the costs and pass them along to those who can pay -- employers. With businesses struggling to stay afloat, this is not the time for employer health care costs to suddenly spike. If we can get people who've lost their jobs coverage and continue to support the very, very, very cheap and efficient community health clinics* this will protect businesses from indirectly shouldering the health care costs of the expanding unemployed.
I don't know everything in this bill. But what I do know of it, we need.
* These are cheaper because they focus on smaller health problems, long term health maintenance, and rely heavily on nurse practitioners.
ETA: Conservatives insist that a proper stimulus package usually has tax cuts, mostly aimed at businesses. They don't like that this is a spending bill.
We tried that already. Bush gave good tax cuts. Everyone I know who owned stock in the last eight years made a mint. Everyone else? "Let them eat cake."
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And did you hear that an administration official called Citicorp and told them to "fix it"? They're not buying the jet any more.
I agree with you about the points you've outlined here. It's amazing how little this is to do - I mean, I know it's a lot in terms of cost and everything else, but it's little in terms of actually stepping up and saying 'Hey, let's do this!" - and yet Bush never bothered to. I'm not trying to make this a partisan-politics comment, other than to say that I finally feel like, whatever happens, and even though I don't have a job, nor do I have health insurance, and it's because of the recession, someone is at least thinking about that. Someone is hearing that this is a problem. Someone is thinking about real solutions. Someone is saying that the no-strings bailouts didn't work (and obviously the pork-barreling worked even less). It's an amazing thing to realise that this is my government, no longer content to just sit back and let the economy, and the infrastructure, and the country, and the people, go to hell in their own way.
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It's nice to have a government actually paying attention. Most economic theory is overly idealistic from what I've seen: it assumes that people act in their own best interest (no, they don't amazingly) with intelligence (oh, heck no), foresight (hahaha) and ingenuity.
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Even if nothing other than that works, I think that would help us a hell of a lot.
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We got out of the Great Depression through stabilizing and regulating banks -- though they did the exact same thing back then. They took the money and didn't lend. A variety of public works projects helped get the country's blood moving.
But it wasn't until government spending made up 50% of the country's business that we got back on our feet. But Roosevelt didn't do that. WWII did.
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Turns out every single Republican voted against the stimulus bill in the House. They lost, vastly outnumbered there, but in the Senate the margins are much, much slimmer.
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