Pork Anyone?

So is anyone interested in some pork? I don’t mean of the swine variety, I mean your hard earned money as ear marks for the President’s Stimulus Package. I realize that the economy is not what we want it to be. I will even go so far as to say that I am thankful that my job is one that will not be threatened by the recent down turn. It seems as if we see thousands of job cuts coming daily but this proposal by Mr. Obama has little substance and a whole lot of pork.

We can look together at the problems, but lets take the mortgage crisis. Although unfortunate, it could have been avoided. No one in the country was complaining about their property values skyrocketing but it is now our cross to bear. With any part of our market, when prices balloon for no reason there will be a painful correction, remember the dot coms?

Another problem caused by the mortgage crisis, many high priced homes were built by contractors, I too would have been building in that environment and many Americans were moving into their dream homes, only to be unable to afford them when the interest rates went up, we know this because it is history. This also caused another casualty, the existing housing market prices also shot up, homes that were worth sixty thousand dollars were now being offered for over one hundred thousand dollars making that market stagnant. These inflated values, were caused by the mortgage industry. By selecting appraisers that would inflate the value of a home, prices continued to rise and business was booming, but now this is the leading edge of our problem. Countless Americans are upside down in their homes and many have mortgage payments higher than some in homes worth two to three times more.

Now we have massive job losses to compound the problem. Does anyone else think that this will have an adverse affect on the economy and raise the foreclosure rate? Could this add to the woes of the auto makers who now have a large clientele who cannot be financed? The answer to both questions is obviously yes. We could continue to look into the many problems of this economy and debate the need for a stimulus package. There is a need to stimulate our economy, but to do so needs to be done responsibly. It needs to be the minimum size possible to get the job done. Not a grandiose spending spree that we will have to pay back.

This plan is so full of pork that to list it all would be too time consuming and of course take too long to read so I would be the only one to enjoy the project. To keep things brief, lets examine my favorite part of the stimulus package, $345,000,000 for prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. Good lord, I saw a liberal talking head defend this by saying that if Americans are not healthy they can’t work. I do not believe that preventing sexually transmitted diseases will put one more American who has lost their job back to work. If this is the point of the stimulus package, then please let’s study the number of trees that could topple onto houses across America. Yes, it is a large project but it would put more people to work than making sure that all the condom machines in the gas stations across America are well stocked.

Duty Calls!