Obama's New Spending Proposal: An Infrastructure Slush Fund

[Geee]

TownHall:

With the U.S. economy in disarray, it is becoming increasingly obvious that Team Obama has no new ideas to help spark economic growth. The various rounds of stimulus had little positive effect and left the nation with an additional $5 trillion in debt. So, it should come as no surprise that the president’s “best” idea is another round of “infrastructure spending”. Here we go again.

Obama’s latest, pathetic prattling about infrastructure and a third (or fourth by my count) stimulus shows that Obama has learned nothing during his thirty months in office. Only recently, Obama admitted he had learned the painful lesson that many of the proposed “shovel ready” projects weren’t shovel ready.

Obama seemed to understand that the $787 billion dollar stimulus bill that he had pushed with wild conviction did not have the intended impact. Unemployment rates have remained high. While small and mid- sized construction firms never experienced the promised building boom, but, instead, went out of business or were forced to cut additional workers. In short, Obama’s plan failed.

Yet, a scant two months later, Obama is spouting the same gibberish, the same hollow promises and the same band-aid solutions to our nation’s economic problems. Obama’s latest attempt, at re-gifting the American people with tempting platitudes of infrastructure spending as a way to create jobs, comes with a new twist. Democrats in congress are offering American businesses with an international presence a chance to repatriate their overseas profits without confiscatory taxes.

Obama is now proposing to allow some of our most successful American companies repatriate profits earned overseas without forcing them to pay double taxes. It is a lot of money too, somewhere between $800 billion and 1 trillion. But here is the catch. Team Obama wants all of that money deposited into an Infrastructure Fund.

First, let’s call the “infrastructure account” what it is—a slush fund for Democrat spending, a personal piggy bank for politicians to dole out largesse to favorites. Top Obama priorities are old standby Democrat hobbyhorses such as green energy, high speed rail and wind farms.

Obama hopes that few will remember what happened with the $787 billion in stimulus that had similar goals. Those taxpayer dollars funded a whole slate of dubious pet projects such as the “Save the Harvest Marsh Mouse” in Pelosi’s district, as well construction of tennis courts and water parks.