Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Didn't the stimulus take care of our infrastructure needs?

On Real Time with Bill Maher last week, he had tea partier Dana Loesch on (who I'd never heard of). The impression I got was the standard one. They hate the stimulus, are misinformed about it and have no real plan other than lowering taxes and stopping spending (except on defense). When asked what specifically she'd cut, she didn't name anything other than the stimulus (which is already done). When Dan Neil cited some stats she came up with the brilliant followup that some people dispute those figures. Anyway while catching up on a backlog of RSS feeds I came across this from Ezra Klein, Didn't the stimulus take care of our infrastructure needs?

"That suggests it would be useful to go back and review Recovery and Reinvestment Act's spending. The proposal finished at $787 billion. Of this, infrastructure accounted for a bit more than $100 billion. Where did the rest go? Well, $288 billion went to tax cuts and incentives. Another $150 billion went to the health-care system, most of it to help Medicaid and COBRA deal with the millions of Americans who'd lost their jobs and, thus, their health-care coverage. Education got another $100 billion, with most of it going to local school systems so they could avoid layoffs and continue with needed building maintenance. About $82 billion went to aid for unemployed workers, including unemployment benefits and food stamps. About another $50 billion went to scientific research, housing subsidies, miscellaneous other items like law enforcement. Wikipedia has a detailed breakdown here."

No comments: