What Could the Stimulus Have Actually Done? (or I’ve Got Your Bailout Right Here Buddy!)
A calculator. A simple calculator. Go ahead, pick one up. Bring up the one on your computer. That calculator is your friend. If you can stand to do it, it can reveal the lie in virtually every statement made by your politicians. They can promise this or that, but the numbers are what they are, no matter how you try to twist words. You can argue the definition of “is”, but “5” is still “5”.
Congress has recently grabbed a mind boggling amount of money from us. They confiscated about 1.5 trillion dollars between the bailout and the stimulus. They told us it would save the economy and save our jobs. It was a lie. The reality stares us down every day. Only those who in denial, like the parent who is positive the needle and spoon are for their child’s cooking class, won’t see.
It’s time for an intervention. Obama claims the stimulus saved or created 300,000 jobs? Others say it did nothing. Even the most optimistic claims pale in comparison to the number of jobs lost. It failed. It did not do what it was claimed to do. If you assume that those in the federal government are not simply misguided 13 year olds, then they deliberately lied. It made no sense then, it has produced no results now.
Now, pick up your calculator. It’s time to expose the power of that amount of money. It’s time to see what they could have done, if they had chosen to. Though it still would have been unconstitutional.
Type in 1.5 trillion. Divide that by 50,000 (the amount of a good paying job plus benefits). You got 30 million, didn’t you? In October of last year, 10 million people were out of work. This October the number was over 15 million. That is 5 million jobs lost! Take that combined 1.5 trillion and you could have given those 10 million people a great paying job for 3 years. You could still give all of our current unemployed folks a job for the next two years. Or you could just give everyone who is currently unemployed 100,000 dollars each. Now there’s some stimulus!
Hell, that could be a 5,000 dollar check for every man, woman, and child in the United States! (assuming a population of about 300 million) How is it that this stunning amount of money did not help?
You want to know how much money 1.5 trillion is, aside from over half of the federal annual budget? (Only half, if Obama has his way) Take the 50 largest cities in the United States, by population. ( http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763098.html ) Put that 1.5 trillion in an annuity account. If that amount could buy you about a 5% interest rate, the interest alone would pay the bloated city budgets of cities from #6 to #50 (Charlotte is 20th).
Yes, 45 of our country’s 50 largest cities could be “economic liberty zones”, where no taxes of any kind were collected. The full city budgets solely paid for by interest, in perpetuity! What business would not relocate to a city where there were no business taxes, no property taxes, no local sales tax, etc. Now that’s how you grow local business!
In case you are wondering, interest from 40 billion would pay for Charlotte’s budget completely. No more taxes or fees necessary. We could even have the trolley. That’s the power of the money stolen from us! That’s how much could be done with the money they took from us this past year for bailouts and stimuli! That’s what was not done. The situation continues to get worse. How quickly do you think things might have improved if they did any of these things?
Obama wants next year’s federal budget to be 3 trillion. Some Republicans might argue a bit, but they will probably help give it to him.
Get out your calculator, the 1.5 trillion that could have done all of these things is only HALF of what they will be confiscating from us next year.
You do the math…
