The Obama administration’s economic stimulus plan could end up wasting billions of dollars by attempting to spend money faster than an overburdened government acquisition system can manage and oversee it, according to documents and interviews with contracting specialists.

So Obama and his administration have no “clear plan” on how to deal with the money and exactly where it will go resulting in possible billions being wasted. This is not stopping Mr. judgment from rushing this bill through riding on the politics of fear.

But Mr. judgment is holding back on sending a surge to Afghanistan that he campaigned on as the right direction because he is not convinced there is a “clear plan” for our mission there.

Pork over Freedom.

“Yes We Can!!!”

Stimulus spends money too fast for accountability

That was the general idea.

We need more overseers to tell us how to spend our money.

lorien1973 on February 9, 2009 at 4:13 PM

“Spawn more Overlords!”
– StarCraft

$2 billion earmark for FutureGen near zero emissions powerplant in Mattoon, IL

My Dad is good friends with an engineer who has been pushing the FutureGen concept. It’s basically coal-gasification using pure oxygen (lots of compression costs to separate out the nitrogen from air), followed by steam-reforming to produce CO2 and hydrogen, followed by separation and burial of CO2 (compression costs again) and burning the hydrogen in turbines to get electricity.

The overall idea is to use the energy from coal combustion to dissociate steam, then burn the hydrogen (making steam again) while burying the CO2. The overall process is less efficient than simply burning the coal, plus there are the compression costs of air separation and CO2 burial, so you get about 25% less electricity from this process per ton of coal burned, but no CO2. This would make Al Gore happy, but use up our coal resources faster. Plus, since hydrogen burns much hotter than coal or natural gas, hydrogen turbines would have to be made of more expensive materials.

According to the FutureGen website, 12 sites were proposed, three of which were in Illinois. Any guesses why a site in Illinois was chosen for the earmark? Also, the FutureGen website predicted a total cost of $1.5 billion. Why, then, do they need $2 billion from the Government?

When you bail out people once, they come back for more (think of the deadbeat sponging relative). It would be the end of adult responsibity. Which, of course, is the point of making people dependent on the government. They let the government take care of them, and make their choices. Avoiding all risk and abdicating liberty.

Wethal on February 9, 2009 at 4:35 PM

And here I thought that this alternative would have no chance passing in a (D) congress!

The stimulus plan presents a stark choice: The government can spend unprecedented amounts of money quickly in an effort to jump-start the economy or it can move more deliberately to thwart the cost overruns common to federal contracts ……

$255 million for “priority procurements” at Coast Guard (polar ice breaker)

Ummmmm…why would we need a “polar ice breaker” when, according to algore, Global Warming is melting the Polar ice cap?

Translation – We need to close the loop hole so American citizens cant buy guns, that way they cant be stolen or illegally sold and will never reach the hands of Mexican gunrunners.

$2 billion earmark for FutureGen near zero emissions powerplant in Mattoon, IL

Yet The Messiah stood there in Elkhart today and brazenly declared that there is not a single earmark in this bill! Does he think nobody in this country can READ?

I don’t get the TV conversion. I heard a caller last week put it in context. Where was his free coupon when 8-tracks changed over to CD’s. Why is it the government responsibility to get people up to date with technology? Besides, I also heard that they ran out of coupons because scalpers scooped them up and are selling the converters on ebay.

ctmom on February 9, 2009 at 3:58 PM

Until they can implant the nuero-receivers in our brains, TV is the best way to feed us their daily pablum. So you see, it is terribly important to our free-spendin’ overlords.

Obama signs an executive order encouraging stimulus projects costing more than $25 million to use union-only project labor agreements. This means that any contractor or subcontractor working on a large project will have to submit a bids with collective bargaining agreements spanning one or more unions for the duration of the project. In theory, you could bid a job with non-union labor, but let a union run the bargaining. In practice, projects with PLAs almost always go to union shops.

What does this mean for the stimulus? Union labor is more expensive. Every project that uses a PLA will cost more, and many of those jobs will use as much capital equipment as possible to minimize the demand for labor. That means that we will get a lot less employment for every dollar of stimulus spent than we would without the PLA.

Obama is offering these “cheap” concessions to the unions because it’s lookng less likely that the Democrats will be able to get EFCA through. But these things aren’t free. They’re just less transparent.

It would make sense to pull this bill back to break it up into more efficient pieces, and focus on real emergency spending and tax cuts in the near term. Perhaps that way we can ensure that we don’t waste tens of billions of dollars by hysterically throwing money without the resources to manage it properly.

Ed,

I’ve come to the conclusion that you are simply uneducable. If you really understood free market capitalism, and spent less time in the middle of the road, you would know that the only thing that makes sense is a bill that spends exactly ZERO dollars.

Only reducing the amount of Federal dollars spent is moral and practical. Only repealing legislation that brought America to this point (the list is nearly endless) is moral and practical. Only radically reducing the scope of Federal power is moral and practical.

There is a place in life for compromise. This is not it.

Well it’s been along, long day with thousands of, but we are happy to report that your efforts, and those of the rest of the U.S. science and technology community, have paid off in a big way – for the time being.

Senators Nelson, Collins, Lieberman and Specter held a press conference earlier this evening, also crediting Senator Snowe, and followed up by Senate Majority Leader Reid, declaring a compromise bill as been reached on the stimulus package. You can read the exact line items of the bill here in an xls document, but the parts we focused on today are below:
—
This is a terrific $3 billion victory for U.S. Science – thank you!

Makes me want to puke.

This IS a spending and appropriations bill…

But Congress didn’t pass ANY of the REAL spending and appropriation bills for last year…. we are still on a conitnuing Resolution.

So, they will still have to do the regular bills… which is where this spending should have been in the first place, if it was so important.

Romeo13 on February 9, 2009 at 4:36 PM

I think McCaskill has let out that if stuff was cut, they’d just put it back into the supplemental appropriations bill that is coming up in the near future. Supposed to be in the trillions, too. And then there’s TARP II… Drudge estimate – close to $10 trillion in the coming weeks in spending. And then there’s the 2010 budget.

As for the summer jobs, put them on trains and send them to the agricultural regions of the country to do the work otherwise done by the migrant farm workers. A little fresh air and time away from the inner-city would do these kids some good.
BuckeyeSam on February 9, 2009 at 4:37 PM

No culture wars please.

$1.2 billion for summer jobs for youth
$10 million to fight Mexican gunrunners

Let’s combine these two programs. It beats makework for inner-city youth.

If that’s too harsh, fine. Increase the budget for fighting gunrunners a hundred- or a thousand-fold. Take if from the ACORN funding if that’s still in there.

As for the summer jobs, put them on trains and send them to the agricultural regions of the country to do the work otherwise done by the migrant farm workers. A little fresh air and time away from the inner-city would do these kids some good. It’s certainly better than giving them a placard so that they can show up at some community bank to extort money for supposedly discriminatory lending practices.

Wethal on February 9, 2009 at 4:19 PM

Thanks. Your terminology is the correct one.
Not a good time to be entering the golden years or have a condition commonly refractive to treatment.

This IS a spending and appropriations bill…

But Congress didn’t pass ANY of the REAL spending and appropriation bills for last year…. we are still on a conitnuing Resolution.

So, they will still have to do the regular bills… which is where this spending should have been in the first place, if it was so important.