welfare reform

3,700 Tax Cheats Got Stimulus Contracts

by Hans Bader on May 25, 2011

in Economy, Stimulus to Nowhere

There has been a lot of news coverage recently about how 3,700 tax cheats got $24 billion in stimulus money. But the stimulus package wasted money in far worse ways. I explain at the Washington Examiner. Unemployment is much higher now than the Obama administration said it would be if the stimulus were enacted. Indeed, it’s higher than Obama administration officials said it would be if Congress had refused to pass the stimulus. (The Obama administration said unemployment would hit 9 percent if Congress refused to pass the stimulus, but not go beyond 8 percent if it did pass the stimulus. But unemployment reached 10.3 percent by October 2009.)

As the failure of the stimulus has become increasingly apparent, the Obama administration has touted its creation of imaginary jobs in non-existent congressional districts.

The stimulus actually provided incentives not to work, since it largely repealed welfare reform and provided incentives for states to increase their welfare caseloads.

 

Obama Fires Inspector General Who Uncovered Fraud, and Honors Defrauder Instead

by Hans Bader on June 11, 2010

in Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade, Zeitgeist

Earlier, President Obama fired the inspector general for the AmeriCorps program after he uncovered fraud by Obama crony Kevin Johnson.  (Johnson did not receive even a slap on the wrist for his fraud; an organization Johnson ran was required to pay $350,000, but it never did so because it was insolvent; and Johnson himself was not ordered by the Obama administration to pay anything.)

Now, the Obama administration is honoring Johnson despite his fraud, inviting him to be a featured speaker at an event for AmeriCorps, the program Johnson defrauded.

The Obama administration fired the inspector general who uncovered the fraud, Gerald Walpin, falsely claiming he was a senile right-winger, even though Walpin was a successful lawyer with recent high-profile court victories who had uncovered millions in fraud against taxpayers, and even though Walpin, a northeastern moderate Republican, was sufficiently non-partisan that he endorsed Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.  (The Obama administration even trumpeted Walpin’s endorsement of Sotomayor to push her nomination.)

Obama Administration Pushes More Bailouts at Taxpayer Expense; America to Bail Out Corrupt Union Pension Funds

by Hans Bader on June 2, 2010 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, International, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere

The Obama administration and its congressional allies are now pushing for billions more in bailouts for mismanaged union pension  funds, and teachers unions.

The union pension bailout bill “would transfer tens of billions of dollars worth of retiree liabilities” from unions “to taxpayers.”  It would bail out the massively underfunded pension fund of the SEIU, a corrupt left-wing union that uses mobs to intimidate, and occasionally beat up, its critics and creditors. (The SEIU serves as a security force for Obama allies and liberal Congressmen seeking to keep Tea Party protesters away from their events.)  The union pension funds are estimated to be underfunded by $165 billion.

The Obama administration is also proposing a multi-billion dollar teacher bailout sought by the teachers’ unions.  Although education spending per student has quadrupled, after inflation, since 1960, and teacher class sizes have shrunk considerably, the Obama administration wants to increase spending even further to prevent states from laying off any teachers.  Even the The Washington Post, which endorsed Obama and has endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate since 1952, considers this unwise and financially reckless “wasteful spending.”  (The SAT has been “recentered” in recent years to hide the fact that SAT scores have effectively gone down even as education spending has skyrocketed.  My 1986 SAT score of 1520 out of 1600 would be a perfect 1600 on the relevant portions of today’s SAT, thanks to “recentering.”)  Ironically, no additional spending would be needed to prevent layoffs if teachers would simply accept small pay cuts.  (The average school teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland, makes $76,483 in base pay–which hasn’t stopped school officials from threatening to sue the County for supposedly inadequate school funding.)

While pushing an unnecessary teacher bailout, the administration has shown little interest in the plight of the unemployed.  It deliberately removed from the $800 billion stimulus package billions in transportation spending that would have stimulated the economy, after feminist leaders complained that such projects would employ blue-collar men, many of whom are now unemployed (80 percent of those who have lost their jobs in the recession are men).   The transportation spending was replaced with wasteful welfare spending, and other provisions of the stimulus package largely repealed the limits on welfare passed in the reforms of 1996.

The Obama administration earlier lifted a $400 billion limit on bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two mortgage giants known as the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs). It was just the beginning: “Late last year, the Obama administration pledged to cover unlimited losses through 2012 for Freddie and Fannie,” reports The New York Times.

At the direction of the Obama administration, Freddie Mac ran up more than $30 billion in losses to bail out mortgage borrowers, some of whom have high incomes. Federal regulators sought to make Freddie Mac hide the resulting losses from the SEC and the public.

Fannie and Freddie helped spawn the mortgage crisis by buying up risky mortgages and repackaging them as prime mortgages, thus creating an artificial market for junk. ”From the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime.” They paid their CEOs millions, and engaged in massive accounting fraud–$6.3 billion at Fannie Mae alone–to increase the size of their managers’ bonuses. As Government-Sponsored Enterprises, they were exempt from the capital requirements that apply to private banks, so they did not have enough reserves to cover their losses when their mortgages started defaulting.

The Obama administration refuses to reform these mortgage giants, saying it is “too hard” to do. Earlier, Senate Democrats blocked reform of the mortgage giants in a party-line vote.

(Obama received $125,000 in contributions from these mortgage giants as a Senator, second only to the corrupt Senator Chris Dodd, who is retiring this year due to his financial scandals. Dodd is the chief drafter of the financial “reform” bill.)

The financial “reform” bills recently passed by the House and Senate do nothing to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But they will increase pressure on banks to make risky loans in depressed neighborhoods, and increase credit card costs.

The Obama administration also recently provided billions for the international bailout of Greece, which came close to bankruptcy thanks to its socialist policies and pensions for people who retire as early as age 50 (in many ordinary occupations, like hairdressers).

Stimulus Package Forces States to Raise Taxes, Harms Economy

by Hans Bader on January 2, 2010 · 2 comments

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, International, Labor, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

The federal government’s $800 billion stimulus package, which failed to cut unemployment, is now forcing states and local governments to raise taxes. The Wall Street Journal describes how “stimulus dollars came with strings attached that are now causing enormous budget headaches . . . At the behest of the public employee unions, Congress imposed ‘maintenance of effort’ spending requirements on states. These federal laws prohibit state legislatures from cutting spending on 15 programs,” such as ”welfare, if the state took even a dollar of stimulus cash,” even if a state’s tax revenue has since fallen due to the recession.  “So when states should be reducing” their spending ”to match. . . lower revenue collections, federal stimulus rules mean many states will have little choice but to raise taxes.”

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package actually would shrink the economy “in the long run.”  Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.

The Washington Examiner says that “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.”  That includes thousands of jobs the administration claims credit for creating in nonexistent Congressional districts. As the Examiner notes:

If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.

The stimulus package actually destroyed thousands of real world jobs by triggering trade wars with Canada and Mexico that killed jobs in America’s export sector (the stimulus package barred a measley 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads, a minor NAFTA violation that led to massive Mexican retaliation against U.S. exports of 40 farm products and kitchen goods worth $2.4 billion).  It also is wiping out jobs by inflicting costly mandates on state governments (such as repealing welfare reform, and imposing costly “prevailing wage” regulations and expensive racial set-asides).

The stimulus package has since spawned countless examples of government waste and corruption.  Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.  Obama’s alleged justification for firing the inspector general turned out to be false.

Stimulus Package Creates Imaginary Jobs, Destroys Jobs in the Real World

by Hans Bader on November 17, 2009 · 4 comments

in Agriculture, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, International, Labor, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package creates imaginary jobs, while destroying ones in the real world.

Billions from the stimulus are being spent on creating tens of thousands of imaginary jobs in 440 phantom Congressional districts, according to the government’s own web site:

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist. . . . The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

From ABC News:

Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.

There’s no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government’s recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don’t exist.

The Washington Examiner says that “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” Readers can view its interactive map of “Inflated Jobs by State.”

As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.”

The stimulus package actually destroyed thousands of real world jobs by triggering trade wars with Canada and Mexico that killed jobs in America’s export sector (the stimulus package barred a measley 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads, a minor NAFTA violation that led to massive Mexican retaliation against U.S. exports of 40 farm products and kitchen goods worth $2.4 billion).  It also is wiping out jobs by inflicting costly mandates on state governments (such as repealing welfare reform, and imposing costly “prevailing wage” regulations and expensive racial set-asides).

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package actually would shrink the economy “in the long run.”  Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.

The stimulus package has since spawned countless examples of government waste and corruption.  Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.  Obama’s alleged justification for firing the inspector general turned out to be false.

Unemployment Skyrockets: “U.S. now beating European unemployment rates”

by Hans Bader on November 10, 2009 · 15 comments

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Healthcare, Insurance, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere

Unemployment is now higher in the U.S. than in Europe,  reports the Washington Post.  “The official U.S. unemployment rate, reported last Friday, now stands at 10.2 percent,” compared to “9.7 percent” in Europe.   This is the highest rate in more than 26 years, and marks a huge change from the recent past, in which unemployment was double the American rate in much of Europe, such as in France.

Unemployment is at 10 percent in France, which refused to adopt a U.S.-style stimulus package, and only 7.6 percent in Germany, which adopted a stimulus package that was smaller relative to its economy than ours was.  (Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated President Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worst in the recession.)

A “broader measure of U.S. unemployment,” including discouraged workers, puts U.S. unemployment at 17.5 percent, reports the New York Times.

As the Post notes, “For many on the left, the lament for years has been: Why can’t America be more like Europe? Why can’t rustic Americans be more like sophisticated Europeans? The sentiment has resurfaced in recent months as the health-care debate has raged on — why can’t the American health-care system be more like Europe’s?”

Well, America is now more like Europe when it comes to unemployment.  But not when it comes to social benefits and protections.  The American Left knows how to import Europe’s failures, but not its successes.

The massive health-care bill passed by the House on Saturday is a classic example.  It would expand health care coverage somewhat, but not to European levels, and it would vastly increase the costs of our health care system, rather than reducing it to European levels.   It would also increase taxes to “European levels of taxation.”  The health care bill contains politically-correct provisions that Europeans would never put up with, like pork for trial lawyers and racial preferences.  And restrictions on national competition in health insurance, which do not exist in Europe.

In France, doctors don’t need to be paid as much, because competing professions, like lawyers, are paid less.  French law is much more conservative than American law when it comes to lawsuits, including lawsuits against doctors.  There are NO punitive damages, and France discourages lawsuits by making unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the other side’s legal bills.  (Other European countries have specialized health courts, rather than American-style jury trials, to cut lawyers’ bills, speedily compensate the injured, and prevent American-style baseless lawsuits against doctors.)  There are no racial preferences — even my Marxist father-in-law, a French trade unionist who likes Michael Moore’s book Stupid White Men, thinks that racial preferences are evil.  French people do not let political correctness shackle their minds the way American leftists do.

Europe is not as far to the left of America as people think, and America’s business climate is already not much more favorable than Europe’s.  For every three ways in which Europe is more socialistic than America, there are two ways in which it is less socialistic than America.  The Obama administration is getting rid of our advantages, but not our disadvantages.

American tort law and family law are much more burdensome, anti-business, and bent on redistribution of wealth, than Europe’s.

Confronted with the specter of new burdens under the health-care bills and global-warming bills backed by the Obama administration, many businesses with the money to do so are afraid to hire people and create jobs lest they be stuck with a large tab for things like health care benefits for newly-hired, less-skilled employees.

The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly admitted that Obama’s stimulus package will shrink the economy “in the long run.”  It contained welfare and repealed welfare reform.  Unemployment is higher now than if Congress had voted it down.

Unemployment Rises to 26-Year High of 9.8%; Obama’s Policies Worsen Unemployment and Credit Crunch

by Hans Bader on October 5, 2009

in Bailout Watch, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, International, Labor, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

Unemployment has risen to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high.

That’s much higher than the Obama administration predicted unemployment would rise, if Congress had refused to pass his $800 billion stimulus package.  The administration claimed unemployment would rise to 8 percent without a stimulus.

Small businesses are finding it more difficult than ever to borrow badly needed money to meet their payrolls.  New financial regulations backed by the administration are contributing to a terrible credit crunch.  Meanwhile, the wealthy Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs, perhaps the biggest donor to liberal politicians, received billions of dollars it didn’t even need from the taxpayers’ $170 billion bailout of AIG.

The administration claimed that the stimulus package would deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose very rapidly after its passage, and the package has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector.

Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worst in the recession.

President Obama claimed the stimulus was needed to prevent an “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office said it would actually shrink the economy “in the long run.”  It subsidizes lots of waste, corruption, and welfare, and repeals welfare reform.   It also contains racial set-asides (which are costly) and prevailing-wage rules (which will waste $17 billion).

More Government Waste, Corruption, and Corporate Welfare, Thanks to the Obama Administration

by Hans Bader on June 14, 2009

in Odds & Ends

Rapidly-rising Medicare spending already threatens “to crush the federal budget,” and much Medicare spending is wasteful, yet the Obama Administration claims it can somehow save money by creating Medicare-like programs to cover all Americans. In the New York Times, economics professor Tyler Cowan calls it “the new voodoo economics.” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson concludes that Obama’s health-care plan “is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three.”

Obama is firing an inspector general who exposed wrongdoing by one of his supporters, and previously uncovered millions of dollars in waste and fraud in the troubled AmeriCorps program, whose budget is being dramatically increased by the Obama Administration. Inspector General Gerald Walpin was fired after he uncovered misuse of Americorps funds and sought to keep the wrongdoer from accessing federal “stimulus money.” The recently-passed stimulus package repealed welfare reform, and it subsidizes waste and corruption.

Congress is moving towards passing a “cash for clunkers” bill that would give people tax credits, but only if they own an old gas-guzzler that they are trading in for a new car. So if you bought a fuel-efficient car in the past, your tax dollars will be used for welfare for people who bought inefficient cars (cars with less than 18 MPG). The bill will increase the national debt (and thus future taxes) by billions of dollars. As Mike Budnick notes in the Wall Street Journal, “This type of legislation rewards people who have made poor decisions and penalizes only people who have already made good choices. Not the kind of incentive that we should propagate. Let the market work.”

Taxpayers are being ripped off to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to enrich wealthy buyers of so-called “toxic assets.” Meanwhile, the Obama Administration’s $787 billion stimulus package is actually killing jobs and shrinking the economy.

Congress passed an FDA tobacco regulation bill, but not without adding insidious provisions that will reduce competition in the tobacco industry, and actually make it harder to introduce products that reduce the harms and health risks of tobacco, notes the Wall Street Journal. We earlier described the bill’s pitfalls and counterproductive provisions. Obama has said he will sign the bill into law.

Billions of tax dollars are being spent on bailing out carmakers, but the primary beneficiaries of this corporate welfare are not the car companies themselves, which could have survived without federal bailouts by simply abrogating their collective bargaining agreements and dealer-contracts in a standard bankruptcy-court reorganization, but the United Auto Workers Union, which spent millions electing Obama and is now calling the shots. Taxpayers and pension funds are being ripped off to enrich the UAW, which enjoys wages much higher than the average American.

A similar government bailout of the auto industry actually backfired in England in the 1970s, destroying its carmakers by leaving them with excessive wages, inefficiency, and political meddling in car design.

Now, even liberal commentators are questioning whether the mushrooming auto bailouts pass constitutional muster, such as Charles Lane in today’s Washington Post. (Lane is so liberal and pro-government that in a front page article in 2003, he characterized the Supreme Court’s 2003 decisions as collectively being great for “civil liberties,” even though he admitted that the Supreme Court had rejected free speech claims in 7 out of its 8 First Amendment cases that term, largely because Lane approved of its decision upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s race-based affirmative action plan — even though legally permissible affirmative-action plans are a discretionary government function, not an individual right or civil-liberty).

Conservative columnist George Will also has a column today criticizing the auto bailouts. He points out that the Administration’s current claim that it can use TARP bank-bailout money for an auto bailout is at odds with the Treasury Department’s past admissions to the contrary: “Last September, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson testified to the Senate that TARP money was necessary for ailing ‘financial institutions.’ Nowhere in the bill’s 169 pages was there any reference to government funding of ‘automobile’ or ‘manufacturing’ companies. In November, Paulson told a House committee: ‘I’ve said to you very clearly that I believe that the auto companies fall outside of [TARP's] purpose.’”

Earlier, commentators like the Heritage Foundation, Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and liberal journalist Andrew Sullivan all agreed that the auto bailouts are illegal or unconstitutional.

Specter Switches Parties, Cementing Liberals’ Filibuster-Proof Control of Senate

by Hans Bader on April 28, 2009

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Features, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

Contradicting earlier claims, Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter has switched to the Democratic Party, cementing the liberals’ filibuster-proof majority on most issues in the Senate.

What is strange about this is that the reason Specter gave for leaving the Republican Party was not social issues (Specter is socially liberal, not just on things like abortion, but also on racial preferences, which are unpopular with the general public and moderate voters), but rather his vote for the bloated $800 billion stimulus package, which will actually shrink the economy in the long run.

It’s not as if Obama has ended Bush’s lackluster record on the economy. Indeed, he’s appointed figures involved in the devastatingly costly Bush bailouts, like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who “missed early signs of the crisis,” and helped ruin Indonesia’s economy, to high posts in his Administration.

Now, Obama is busy catering to the United Auto Workers union, at taxpayer expense, in the Detroit auto bailout. As Larry Kudlow notes,

“The government is about to take over GM in a plan that completely screws private bondholders and favors the unions. Get this: The GM bondholders own $27 billion and they’re getting 10 percent of the common stock in an expected exchange. And the UAW owns $10 billion of the bonds and they’re getting 40 percent of the stock. Huh? Did I miss something here? And Uncle Sam will have a controlling share of the stock with something close to 50 percent ownership. And no bankruptcy judge. So this is a political restructuring run by the White House, not a rule-of-law bankruptcy-court reorganization.

Meanwhile, top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett opened the door wide on CNN yesterday to bank nationalization and CEO firings. Unfortunately, my take that the economic stress tests are a political stalking horse for more government ownership, more government control of the banks, and more government disruption of shareholder rights and normal corporate governance looks to be coming true.”

Obama has been a profligate big-spender. He claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office concluded before and after its passage that the stimulus package will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run.

The stimulus package also guts welfare reform, which Specter voted for in 1996 and has claimed to support.

Obama’s budgets don’t add up, either, piling up $9.3 trillion in red ink, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a staggering $2.3 trillion more than Obama claimed, and more than double the deficits under the Bush baseline.

Liberal Republicans are claiming that the Republican Party should be a “big tent” that welcomes big spenders like Specter. But historically, the “big tent” was a concept designed to enable the GOP to compete in socially liberal parts of the country by offering socially-liberal, fiscally-conservative candidates — not an excuse for supporting big spending (like Obama’s) that goes even beyond Bush’s record of “fiscal profligacy.”

Stimulus Guts Welfare Reform, Is Deceptive

by Hans Bader on February 12, 2009 · 7 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

The stimulus package will gut welfare reform even more than previously feared. That’s the conclusion of Mickey Kaus, a moderate Democrat who now appears to regret voting for Obama. The stimulus package will reward states that promote welfare dependency, even more than federal subsidies did before the 1996 welfare reform law, and reduce economic growth.

Clayton Cramer notes that the stimulus package is being sold to the public under the false pretense that without it, we will go into another Great Depression, even though Congressional leaders know the economy will begin recovering soon even without any stimulus. He aptly compares the politics of the stimulus package to tribal leaders slaughtering cattle in order to make the sun rise, and then taking credit for the sun rising.

The Congressional Budget Office has admitted that within ten years, the economy will be smaller, not larger, because of the stimulus package, which will weigh down the economy under an enormous debt burden.

Many of the new, supposedly-temporary spending programs in the stimulus may wind up being made permanent, which could result in its true cost being above $3 trillion. Few rank-and-file members of Congress have actually read the 1,434-page stimulus bill, so it may be full of nasty surprises and hidden pork that we learn about only after it is signed into law.

Today, the Washington Examiner disclosed that the stimulus bill may end up funding the radical group ACORN. ACORN helped bring on the mortgage crisis by promoting “liar loans” and other high-risk loans to people with bad credit. It has a long history of financial fraud and vote fraud.