stimulus bill

Thomas Frank has a terrific op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, praising President Obama’s recent presidential memorandum declaring the end of an era of unrestrained government outsourcing.
The president “meant to put the kibosh on the GOP’s favorite method for spreading the wealth around,” Frank writes, noting the astronomical growth of federal spending under former [...]

Amid the Democrats’ boostering and the Republicans’ assaults on the final stimulus package, almost no one is focusing on a key part of the bill that will be critical to making it work: accountability for how that $787 billion is spent. In fact, a look at the final bill reveals that to a large extent, [...]

Turns out the final language included in the agreed-upon stimulus bill does indeed include protections for employees of government contractors — like KBR, Halliburton, etc. — who report fraud, waste and abuse of taxpayer money, even if they report within their own company rather than to an outside government agency.
As I reported earlier, that protection [...]

Via CNN:
House Democratic leaders were forced to put off until Friday a vote on the $789 billion economic stimulus bill after many rank-and-file Democrats who were unhappy with some spending cuts demanded time to read the compromise measure.
That will be tough to do. The bill text has yet to be finalized.

Here’s some good news: since our story Tuesday about Congress’ failure to include adequate protection for government contractor whistleblowers in the stimulus bill, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) has taken up the cause.
McCaskill has introduced a whistleblower amendment — S.AMDT. 196 — to the stimulus bill. Although the amendment isn’t yet available on the Library of [...]

We ran a piece today touching on the difficulty of fixing an economy broken by the bursting of something as large as the recent housing bubble. That is, if the inflated housing market allowed millions of Americans to leverage equity to buy things they couldn’t afford — and if millions of jobs were created to [...]

Is there an echo in here?
In The New York Times today, op-ed columnist David Brooks blasts the Democrats’ House-passed stimulus package with the charge that it doesn’t meet the “timely, targeted and temporary” criteria pushed by supporters:
In a fateful decision, Democratic leaders merged the temporary stimulus measure with their permanent domestic agenda — including big [...]

With this morning’s news that employers laid off 524,000 workers in December, at least one prominent economist has some news of his own: “The economy is the jaws of a depression,” Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland, wrote to reporters this morning.
What’s the criterion? Morici claims it’s this: Recessions correct themselves, while [...]

It’s no mystery that the first item on the agenda when Congress returns to Washington next week will be an enormous spending package designed to create jobs and get the derailed economy back on track. The bill is expected to be in the range of $800 billion, and Democrats have said they hope to have [...]