Aha! Senator Ballsy fesses up. Good. "The lack of alternatives clears the mind marvelously" - Henry Kissinger https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...primary/ar-AAu1N4K?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp
The biggest problem with the stimulus was the tax incentives made up about 40% of it in total but didn’t have much requirements in terms of hiring. You remember Solyndra. That was the poster child for arra on the tax side. This is not saying the recovery act was a total failure, it wasn’t, just when we do that sort of thing we need to make sure shovels are going in the dirt and trucks are being loaded.
These are wonderful ideas! Why aren't we are moving faster on them? It is a mystery to me, but if I had to make a wild guess, I would guess it is because, when your great ideas come to fruition, there would be winners an losers in the corporate world, and the losers have virtually unlimited money for lawyers, lobbyists, and political campaign contributions. The U.S. was as much as thirty years behind the rest of the developed world getting HD TV, and the reason is purely political. Even today some cable providers, e.g., comcast, try to get their customers to pay extra for HD on all channels even though they have to degrade the signal intentionally and create separate non-HD channels. It reminds me of when we had to pay extra for touch tone or color telephones. That ended with the break up of AT&T and more competition. Now we are allowing AT&T to buy out their competitors once again. What a Country! It is all about pricing and deception, at which we capitalists excel. What's ironic is that we capitalists exclaim the virtue of "free markets" while doing everything we can to thwart them. We don't see anything ironic here because we capitalists have our own definition of "free market". To us it means freedom from government interference in our business and freedom to do whatever we want. Whereas to everyone else a "free market" means a market where everyone can compete on a level playing field. "Competition is a sin." -- John D. Rockefeller
Bitter experience teaches us that politicians are not handing out large sums of public money without some of it sticking to their grubby fingers, one way or another.
by the way its amazing that the anti establishment is so strong incumbents senators are choosing not to run. the people are being heard. First hundreds of democrats were run out of federal and state govt. Now that republicans are not doing what they promised they are being run out. If we could get the money out of politics we could get our country to be great again.