Obama's Political Pork-Barrel Infrastructure by Thomas DiLorenzo

Obama's Political Pork-Barrel Infrastructure by Thomas DiLorenzo:

"This is exactly how President-elect Obama's proposed 'stimulus package' should be viewed:
It is part payoff to the urban political machines, labor unions, and other special interests that helped get him elected, and part vote-buying (with federal tax dollars) scheme as the first step in his 2012 re-election campaign. It will no more 'stimulate' the economy than Herbert Hoover's 1929 'stimulus package' did, despite the fact that it accounted for 13 percent of the entire federal budget. Hoover continued to increase 'public works' spending by massive amounts, accompanied by massive tax increases to pay for it all. FDR did the same, increasing the amount of spending and taxes by orders of magnitude.

All of it had no positive effect whatsoever on the overall economy; the primary economic effect was to balloon the size of federal, state, and local governments at the expense of shrinking the private sector — and to create more private-sector unemployment."