Posts
The rest of the bill is about what you expected--a lot of probably useless green energy spending that I fairly confidently predict will come to nothing, some stuff we should have done anyway, and a bunch of pandering, porky highway spending. The better the projects are, the less likely they are to be stimulative, because they're complicated and time consuming, like healthcare IT and high-speed rail. If we do them on a stimulus timeframe, we'll screw them up, waste an enormous amount of money, and likely make American voters worse off in the long term by locking them in to bad solutions--we won't get a second bite at high-speed rail between LA and San Francisco. Mostly, Democrats took their wish lists, called them "stimulus", and look set to inflict them on the American people in badly done drag.Ah, the yawning gap between Hope and reality! Well, if massively wasteful spending is going to be inflicted on the American people, at least let Democrats do the inflicting, eh?
(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)
I'd have a lot more sympathy for Ms. McArdle if she had merely abstained from voting for president, or voted 3rd party (she can easily be forgiven for not voting for JM). But I have none for her or anyone that actively cast their vote for Obama and his liberalism. What the hell did they expect?
ReplyDeleteI agree. It seems that many so-called "libertarians" voted for Obama. Now, I could understand that under certain circumstances. And I certainly understand how a libertarian would not want to vote for McCain. But, under the present circumstances, they chose a guy who promised massive increases in spending, knowing full-well that he would have the support of a Congressional majority.
ReplyDeleteI used to consider myself a "libertarian-leaning conservative," as I had few other descriptions that seemed to apply. But now, "libertarian-leaning" clearly doesn't, since I no longer have any idea what so-called "libertarians" stand for. I guess I'll just stick with plain-old "conservative" or perhaps the more appropriate "classical liberal". At any rate, I now consider libertarians to be a joke.
Jason