change?

what if this "stimulus" doesn"t work?

obama is concentrating on freeways and ignoring everything else at a time when people are using alternative transportation in record numbers. if his pick for transportation secretary gives us any insight into the future of this administration, the only "change" we will receive is a shift from 1980s mindset to the 1950s. not quite the "change" people were expecting.

roads and freeways are already less congested due to the decline in the economy, while buses and rail are overcrowded. regardless of which side of the fence you stand on in terms of public transportation(love it or hate it), the motto, squeaky wheel gets the grease should apply here. the squeaky wheel is obviously alternative transportation, not undercrowded freeways.

i'm surprised, especially since biden is such an Amtrak dude, but that may be a good thing, a vice prez with too much influence can be a bad thing, from what i understand.

Then there's the "stimulus."

According to jim berard, a spokesman for one of the politicos involved in the stimulus, "we like the environmentally friendly way of doing things but the charge we were given was to come up with something that can happen quickly ... we can’t lose sight of what the primary goal here is, and that is to put people to work."

no shit. But jim, I don’t have a ph.d. and have never served in office and even I can see how shortsighted this is.

this goes against his promise to "stimulate" alternative energy usage and such. that money could go to industries such as solar and wind power, which would eventually become fully self-sustaining, keeping people employed for much longer than the freeway construction industry, which depends almost entirely on it’s next government handout to survive.

while I am a fan of the old "new deal", simply to enact a clone of this, in this day and age is suicide. The "new deal" was aimed squarely at blue collar workers. during the depression, blue collar folks were the people out of work. all you had to do was give someone a pickaxe and suddenly they weren’t living out of a car and could feed their family, which was all they needed back then. whereas now, the richer, better educated, white collar people are out of work and not pumping their wealth through the economy. the circumstances of this economic disaster are completely different. you can't give an out of work banker or web designer a hardhat and pair of overalls and expect them to operate a backhoe.

in essence, all he's doing is putting money into projects that bush neglected for 8 years, this is barely stimulating and hardly the shot in the arm that this economy actually needs to move forward.

if the "stimulus" is nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to keep people working and things continue downwards and all his projects become the same ill planned reactions, they will fail. And in the end, all we'll end up with is more debt.

he said that things would get worse before they get better, well put he should put his money where his mouth is - in things that will take time to develop into things that can eventually sustain themselves.

this is a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem.

link | rss | share | posted: 2008-12-24 08:28:00

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