United Liberty

Security theater paid for by stimulus dollars:

The Transportation Security Administration is spreading airport body-scanner technology across the country.

A TSA official said Friday that units will be fielded next week in Chicago, and in the coming months at Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; San Jose, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio; San Diego; Charlotte, N.C.; Cincinnati; Los Angeles; Oakland, Calif.; and Kansas City.

They are among 150 machines bought with money from the federal stimulus package signed into law by President Obama last year.

Three of the new machines are going online at Boston’s Logan International Airport on Monday.

Deployment of the machines was announced in the fall, before a Nigerian allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day with explosives concealed in his underwear.

But that event highlighted the need for additional security in the U.S. aviation system.

Not only is the stimulus bill bad for taxpayers, it’s aiding the TSA in eroding your civil liberties as well.

According to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office shows the stimulus bill passed by Congress will now cost $75 billion more (from $787 billion to $862 billion) than taxpayers were originally told by the Obama Administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress.

Here is the story from CNN:

My apologies for posting so much about polls the last few days, but much of what is coming out is showing voters’ contempt for much of what has come out of since President Barack Obama took off last year.

Last year during the Obama Administration’s push for a Keynesian-style “stimulus” package, Americans were told that unemployment would not rise above 8% with the stimulus and would surpass 9% without it (see page 5 of the administration’s report, The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Program).

Unemployment is 10% today and jobs are still being lost, so it’s no wonder Americans believe the “stimulus” bill was a bad idea:

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Sunday say they oppose the stimulus package, with 42 percent supporting it.

Last March, just weeks after the stimulus bill was signed into law by President Barack Obama, a CNN poll indicated that 54 percent of the public supported the program, with 44 percent opposed.

The program, formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, attempts to stimulate the country’s economy by increasing federal government spending and cutting taxes at a total cost to the government of $787 billion. No Republicans in the House and only three in the Senate voted in favor of the bill.

Earlier this month the Associated Press reported that spending on transportation had no measurable impact on the economy, noting “spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn’t matter.”

The Associated Press is out with an analysis today concluding that spending for roads,  bridges and other transportation projects have not “primed the pump” of economic growth like many neo-Keynesian claimed:

Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.

Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn’t matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama’s argument that more road money would address an “urgent need to accelerate job growth.”
[…]
AP’s analysis, which was reviewed by independent economists at five universities, showed that strategy hasn’t affected unemployment rates so far. And there’s concern it won’t work the second time. For its analysis, the AP examined the effects of road and bridge spending in communities on local unemployment; it did not try to measure results of the broader aid that also was in the first stimulus like tax cuts, unemployment benefits or money for states.

Despite this, Congress is planning a second stimulus, using under the mask of a jobs bill, to spend even more money on transportation projects. Apparently, we learned nothing from the Lost Decade in Japan, which economist Steve Entin notes was nearly turned into an island of concrete when Keynesian economic policies were tried time and time again.