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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (15464)	7/16/2009 1:48:10 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

Re: "I can accept that, BUT THEN how come only 3% of the money has been spent so far?" I don't know anything about that "3%" figure of yours but, even assuming for the purpose of discussion that it might be true, 40% of the total Stimulus bill was TAX CUTS... and they at least are IN PLACE right now. So, your "3%" figure must refer to just the spending portion of the bill, (making it 3% of the remaining 60% of the total appropriation that you are referring to....) Which would mean that 43% of the entire appropriated expense of the bill has been rolled-out thus far. Now... I'm certainly no expert of federal road and bridge contracts and such! But there are laws that govern the bidding process that they must go through before winning bidders can be selected and construction started. (As I wrote before: we really don't want more multi-Billions in no-bid contracts let by the federal government, do we?) I'm sure that everyone would be screaming bloody murder right about now if existing laws governing the contracting process had been by-passed by the Stimulus legislation, and $400 Billion or so had been given out in NO-BID CONTRACTS. Likely... that would have been the only way to deploy that much spending any faster.... (and, although I wish it were possible to roll out the stimulus spending that much faster, I would not want that at the risk of resorting to the 'dirty politics' stench of massive amounts of NO-BID CONTRACTS like we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan....) I expect that by the end of this current year (same year the money was appropriated) we will probably see that perhaps 50% or so of the appropriated spending amounts has been placed in projects and the projects are rolling... and I would also guess that by late next Spring nearly 100% of the appropriated spending will have been placed, and by the end of that year nothing will be left to spend (other than the 40% that was put into tax cuts... which will still largely be with us) of the Stimulus bill's appropriations. That's probably world record time for something of this magnitude... and I don't believe that anyone who ever really gave the matter that much attention when they were discussing and planning for it ever expected that any faster roll-out was possible (absent NO-BID contracts, of course! Heaven help us if they had taken that route!)