I'm not happy about it.
Take for instance the $8b for high speed rail between Las Vegas and Disneyland and the high speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That $8b is only for engineering studies!
I thought President Obama promised "shovel ready" projects?
Then, there's Nancy Pelosi's promise to put the bill online for 48hrs for public review before any voting took place. Didn't happen.
Why? Speaker Nancy had to catch a 6pm flight tonight and she has a meeting with the Pope.
For Pete sake, the Pope comes before the American people? What happened to the transparency that President Obama promised? I'm not seeing it.
I'm not happy that the Republicans cutting a lot of school refurbishing out of the bill. I thought that's what this stimulus package was partly about? Fixing/repairing schools and creating jobs to do so?
Why are we spending $8b for engineering studies for projects way down the road? Why aren't we spending $8b on repairing schools, roads, bridges?
...it's just same old political games in Washington DC - just a different party running the show.
I'm disappointed.
I don't know.
What kind of jobs will be needed for the engineering studies, will these be saved or created? What level of jobs are they? When will the money actually be paid? How long will the engineering studies take? What percentage of the cost goes to actual work, how much goes to profit margin?
I do find the $8b amount to be so high that I wonder how much of that will go to actual jobs and not profit margin, and how much will be earned/paid in the first year; but until you know the answers to those questions, you cannot really determine how 'stimulative' such engineering studies may or may not be.
Incidentally, for literally 'shovel-ready' projects, it would be good to know how much is labor, how much is domestic product and how much is foreign product. I understand that there is basically no existing steel industry in the U.S. now... if a project required using a lot of steel (bridgework, for instance), where does it come from? Japan?
