Can governors do anything to stop the stimulus bill or will their efforts provoke a constitutional crisis?
I feel almost guilty about the title of this article because by the time I was finished with the research it was clear that the answer was probably no. At one point it looked like there was hope that a group of governors would stand up against irrational and dangerous federal spending and refuse to accept money (and the strings attached to it) from the so-called stimulus plan, but as we get close to the passage of the bill that hope seems to be fading.…
Article comments
26 - Doug Hunter
"Certainly I believe there should be a strong government safety net."
For every person seeking a honest handup there is another (or more) looking for a handout. There is an underclass that uses the rules of the system against it. They cobble together disability benefits, welfare, housing vouchers, food stamps, alimony, and child support to eek out an existence. They hide income, duck taxes, and have relationships without marriage to game the system.
27 - handyguy
You state this with great certainty, but without any backup.
Does this fraud really exist, in the organized manner you describe? If so, how large is it? Even if it is as large as you imply, does that mean we stop all government aid to the needy? What are you basing this on and what are you saying it means in terms of policy?
Or are you just throwing out some more ideological ill will? We definitely need some more of that around here.
28 - Dave Nalle
Handy, how on earth can one live on $405 a month? Well, I have some ideas, but it seems like an unsustainable situation. If you've got a car and some skills you should immediately move somewhere that there are jobs going begging. Compared to $405 a month the 6 people who asked me if I needed help in Home Depot today earn a princely wage.
Dave
29 - Irene Wagner
Sure there are bound to be able-bodied people who scrape by on government benefits. For every $10 siphoned off the system by small potatoes thievery like that, there's probably $10,000 taken by elected psychopaths (who hypocritically promised more benefits for the poor or who hypocritically promised lower taxes) who do mysterious things with all the money we've been paying in taxes, so that it a lot of it never gets to the poor...and so taxes need to be raised again...and they get more of it...
Nope, no references. I don't know of many who would disagree with the "doing mysterious things with the money we've paid in taxes" part, not these days anyway.
30 - Clavos
For every $10 siphoned off the system by small potatoes thievery like that, there's probably $10,000 taken by elected psychopaths...
Or by just plain scumbags, like the 58 year old Miami physician (a female) who was just sent away for more years than she's likely going to live for ripping off Medicare to the tune of $11 million.
I applaud the judge (also female) who sentenced her to enough years she'll never get out. With a little luck, maybe someone inside will off the doctor before long and save us some money.
31 - Glenn Contrarian
For Dave and Rob Daugherty -
First for Dave, an apology. I read Rob Daugherty's reply and I thought it was yours, and I apologize sincerely. I am sorry for posting as if what he wrote was by you. This is not the first time I made a stupid mistake like this, and Lord knows it won't be the last.
That was NOT an attempt of 'misdirection' on my part - it was a stupid error on my part. However combative I may be, I do NOT try to use trickery or warped rhetoric to change the minds of others. Please do not ever assume that I use such base guile as a tactic.
BE THAT AS IT MAY, you still posted as if ACORN was going to get billions, which they most certainly will NOT. I think you know this, and if you did know it, then while I am certainly guilty of making a stupid mistake, YOU are guilty of intentional gross exaggeration.
AND FOR ROB DAUGHERTY...dude, verify your sources, willya? I try not to use untoward language...but your reference was pure crap - it's 'numbers' were based on an Excel spreadsheet that listed NO SOURCE DOCUMENTATION WHATSOEVER.
32 - Cindy D
RE # 28
That was $405/week Dave.
33 - handyguy
Yes, $405 per week. Still a stretch for NYC. I did get a severance payment, which will have been used up soon.
34 - Ruvy
Glenn,
I have no URL sources for this - only my gut. A number of times I sought work with ACORN, thinking that it was about community activism and the like. Every single time I went for an interview, I got this bad feeling that ACORN was all about hustling people to accept things or do things they did not want to do. Every single time I got this strong feeling in my gut that these were people I wanted very badly to stay away from.
I see what they have brought forth to you for a president - and all I can say is that I'm glad I stayed away. My conscience feels better.
35 - Roger Nowosielski
All f ... bureaucracies are like that. You should have lived in the city of Oakland, Ruvy. Nepotism is the defining principle, in addition to who knows whom. But they all talk a good game.
36 - bliffle
While deserving and needy people continue to suffer, we, the US Taxpayer, continue to subsidize the worst banks with the misbegotten TARP:
bailout sleuth
" By Chris Carey on February 14, 2009 9:08 PM
Regulators closed four more banks on Friday, seizing their assets and deposits and placing them with other financial institutions.
Two of the four failed banks were absorbed by companies that had received taxpayer capital through the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, continuing a trend that BailoutSleuth has been tracking for the past few months.
Of the thirteen banks shut down by regulators since the start of the year, nine were taken over by other institutions whose own balance sheets had been bolstered by the government."
Can there be anything more nuts than SUBSIDIZING the growth of banks that will be even more "too big to fail" in coming years?
Who thinks this stuff up?
This means that even federal anti-trust will be hampered against these dodos since WE subsidized them.
ALL of the TARP funds and ALL of the bailout money in the Stimulus should be re-allocated to saving homes in foreclosure and getting the already-evicted back into their homes.
What we are doing is destroying the USA with taxpayers money.
37 - Dave Nalle
Who thinks this stuff up?
From what I can tell, most bad ideas originate in the big, round and greed filled head of Chris Dodd.
And don't forget that 90% of the Republicans in Congress voted against TARP.
Dave
38 - Doug Hunter
"You state this with great certainty, but without any backup." - Handy
Why do I need a 'study' to tell me what I can see with my own eyes. The first thing I mentioned in my list of abused programs was disability. I've never studied the history of disability or really been that interested. I know that when I see application after application of perfectly healthy looking people listing SSI income that something is up. Sure enough, after I read your post I looked up the actual statistics which bore out exactly what I could surmise from observation. Per capita rates for disability have increased fourfold in the last few decades.
39 - handyguy
Doug, all I can say is that I'm glad you're not making policy. Spotty observational data and hunches may be OK for making glib comments on here, but your observations prove nothing at all. You have no knowledge whatsoever about whether these individuals [however many or few of them there are] are disabled. You have only your own prejudice, your assumption that they are malingerers.
And my question still stands: say you could prove large-scale welfare fraud. Are you saying we should not have welfare at all because of that? Or should we possibly just enforce the rules better? That's if there's a problem -- which you believe because of your ideology, not because of empirical evidence or proof.
40 - Clavos
There certainly is large-scale Medicare fraud -- to the tune of $7 million daily/365 days a year, according to an extensive muckraking series by the Miami Herald published late last year.
From today's edition of the Herald:
41 - handyguy
I'm happy for the doctors in question to be exposed and punished.
Doug was talking about individuals who receive aid committing fraud, not others like doctors who game the system.
The Medicare fraud doesn't mean we shouldn't have Medicare, and other fraud [speculative in the case of Doug's post] shouldn't affect our attempts to aid the poor and disabled.
42 - Glenn Contrarian
Clavos -
There you go again....
It wasn't MEDICARE committing the fraud, now was it? It was the DOCTORS who they contracted with...who were defrauding the American people by defrauding Medicare...much as the Republican party enabled Big Pharma to defraud America on a TRULY grand scale (tens of billions) by not allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices. Medicare (unlike the VA) had to pay the prices offered, and not a penny less.
If you're SO sure that Medicare is committing so much fraud on a grand scale, howzabout showing us where MEDICARE - and not the doctors who submit fraudulent bills - is actually committing the fraud?
43 - Doug Hunter
As to hunches, you should open your eyes sometimes instead of letting others tell you what to think. The world often isn't as complicated as it seems and when someone tells you it is, it's often because they have something to hide. Even something as 'complex' as the recent mortgage mess.
If I told you could invest your money on 100% loans plus closing costs, fees, and furniture thrown in to people putting little or none of their own money in without documentation of their income or with a history or nonpayment, then explained to you how much it cost to get a foreclosed property off the books all for the introductory interest of 3% for the first year or two you'd with 7-8% return afterwards you'd definitely balk. It was a very simple matter for a laymen to see that risk was being underpriced. Wall street created a cloud of compexity around this simple product to defraud investors which again reinforces my point that when their is complexity there is usually something being intentionally hidden.
Anyway, to your questions. It's very simple to see the drive to get on disability. With an NPV of approximately $250K from cash payments and lifetime healthcare there is powerful incentive to get on the rolls. Toss in pretty lax rules on what constitutes a total disability (including a large range of psychological disorders) and a lawyer advertising on TV to take your case for free I can see why alot of these people make the decision. Is that fraud? Not necessarily. They're just taking advantage of the rules as provided to them.
What needs changed are those rules and the incentives that promote questionable behavior. How you ask? Get rid of incentives for failure and treat people equally. It really is that simple.
Instead of making people avoid jobs, hide cash income, stay out of marriage, and give away assets to qualify for medical care give everyone universal healthcare.
Instead of cutting off benefits like food stamps at modest income levels subsidize quality food for everyone and offer middle income families a credit equal to what poor people get with their stamps. Then there's nothing lost if you improve your situation.
That's alot of what frustrates people. You see people sending death threats to the octuplet mom and putting here down. That's pent up anger that the system rewards people for these things. They don't understand why she's getting paid enough to do nothing but raise kids and still can afford in vitro when they're working their asses off with no time for their kids and can barely pay for their basic healthcare. Frustrate them enough and they might just call that social security lawyers' number on the screen, their collective backs are hurting anyway.
On a side note, I did have my hopes up for the Obama stimulus. What I see on the social side is more of the same, very little for actual working middle class and lots of handouts to those who do little or no work.
44 - Roger Nowosielski
You're not going to eliminate the welfare class with one clean sweep. It had accrued over the generations. One way to start would be to place all able-bodied persons in work-situations. That should have started long time ago. It's kind of late now.
45 - bliffle
Roger will discover the answer if he keeps digging like this.
The fact is we can't put every able-bodied person to work in our current situation. There isn't enough work to go around, especially if people fueled by desperation keep increasing their weekly work hours.
We have assured this result with persistently increasing productivity for the past 60 years.
For a long time we compensated for increased productivity by increasing consumption, largely through advertising.
But now our high consumption has been diverted to foreign manufacturers, thus undermining the available work.
This has been exacerbated by increasing skills requirement in almost all workplaces. It is no longer sufficient to have a strong back and a willing attitude. Those things are almost worthless. Witness the crowds of unwanted unskilled laborers standing around in the Home Depot lot.
An unskilled laborer is almost worthless, even in traditional trades such as gardening and construction. A campesino from a rancho in remote Mexico may be able to till a cornfield but he's worthless to tend tomatoes, carrots, squash and trim overgrown shrubs and trees. Even a simple weed-whacker is beyond his skills. let alone any kind of garden carpentry or architecture.
On the construction site an unskilled worker is just a liability hazard. There simply is no place for simple heavy lifting. Even driving nails is a skilled job now (one laughs to see Jimmy Carter and other celebrities putting on a show at Habitat For Humanity by hammering nails). Most modern construction jobs now use highly developed materials, complex tools, and classroom training for erection.
Sixty years ago Norbert Weiner (a great MIT WW2 engineer for the illiterates out there) said that no man could compete with a steamshovel and earn a subsistence wage. John Henry, anyone?
We have to spread the jobs we need among a wider population, and we have to cease expecting everyone to earn their way in our traditional Puritanical way.
It's better if a husband and wife each work 20 hours a week and spend more time with their children and taking care of family affairs.
Maybe it's better if an artistic boy spends his time painting rather than trying to be an insurance adjuster. Maybe, with enough effort, he'll even paint something that is pleasant to look at, an outcome which seems not to be given by our present system of overpaid Celebrity Artists, who seem bound to paint things that make your eyes smart.
Spread the work! The wealth will take care of itself.
46 - Roger Nowosielski
But that's why, bliffle, this should have started ages ago. You remember the advent of what they called "automation" - way before the computer revolution. There was talk back then, and hope, of reducing the work week to 35 hours - even to thirty or less. Would have been perfectly fine by me - creating a semi-working, semi-leisure class. But it never materialized, though, did it? In fact, there was an avalanche of women entering the work-force, part-time at first and then full time. And it depressed the wages all around, with the effect that now both members of the household had to work in order to maintain their old lifestyles.
There was a window, then, which we had missed. I guess too many working people were just too greedy - all they wanted is more material goods.
Well, it's haunting us now.