Congressman Paul opposed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - also known as the Stimulus. Prior to it's passage, Congressman Paul warned that the government was playing games with the economy that would have tragic results. He noted that while jobs could be a sign of a good economy just as a high energy level is a sign of a healthy body, stimulus projects were like drugs that gave an addict a temporary high to be dealt with at a later expense. The stimulus is the high for jobs and the crash is the damage to the money done by such a project.
After the passage of the bill, Congressman Paul addressed the various allocations of money and the waste involved. He noted that much of the money simply went to rescue states that refused to reduce their budgets, and that much of the money went to projects like Americorps and other non-stimulus items. He noted that he supported tax cuts, but that those cuts should be offset with reductions in spending.
When the stimulus passed, Congressman Paul stated that in his opinion overspending was the problem that caused financial decline and that the further overspending in the stimulus was wasteful and would turn the recession into a depression.
A year after the stimulus, Congressman Paul noted that the reductions in withholding that President Obama was touting did not reduce the amount of taxes actually owed by Americans and would be a big disappointment to a number of Americans. He also noted that the creation of more government jobs was a burden to the private sector.
Stimulating Our Way to Rock Bottom
In January of 2009, Congressman Paul used his "Texas Talk" address to discuss the upcoming stimulus and called it the wrong answer.
Stimulating Our Way to Rock Bottom
With attention turning to the next big economic stimulus package, questions are still swirling about our economic troubles. How did we get here? How do we get out? As usual, Washington has all the wrong answers. According to many politicians, we got here by not spending enough, not consuming enough, and not regulating enough. Now government, like some mythical white knight, is going to ride in to save the day by blanketing the economy with dollars, hiring an army of new bureaucrats, creating make-work jobs, and sending everyone some form of a bailout check. The debate seems to focus on whether this will cost enough to save the economy, or if this is just a “down payment” with much more government spending to come. Talk like that would be comical, if the results weren’t going to be so tragic.
The results will be worsening economic woes until we learn our lesson. But instead Congress is behaving like drug addicts who must hit rock bottom before they are ready to face reality. They are playing foolish games with the economy now because they are thinking only of political expedience. This talk of job creation is a perfect example.
Contrary to the belief of many, the goal of the economy is not job creation. Jobs can be a sign of a healthy economy, as a high energy level can be a sign of a healthy body. But just as unhealthy substances can artificially give the addict that burst of energy that has nothing to do with health, artificially created jobs just exacerbate our problems. The goal of a healthy economy is productivity. Jobs are a positive outcome of that. A “job” could be to dig a hole one day, and fill it back up the next, or perhaps the equivalent at a desk. This does no one any good. But the value in that paycheck ultimately has to come from taxing someone productive. Some think this round-robin type of economic model is supposed to get us somewhere.
Politicians and bureaucrats have already done their fair share to ensure that jobs in the private sector are prohibitively complicated and expensive to create. They are now shocked that the economy is shedding jobs, and want to simply create hundreds of thousands of jobs to make up for the job losses, through another so-called economic stimulus package. The private sector must be permitted to do that, but instead they are massively burdened with taxes and webs of red tape and regulation. Washington’s bandaids will only prolong this agony. The Austrian school of economics teaches that only a free market economy, unencumbered by onerous government controls, creates long-term prosperity. Politicians, however, tend to be notoriously short-sighted.
I am left with these questions – who is going to be left standing to tax in the private sector to pay for all these public sector make-work jobs? Is Washington really to be considered some sort of savior for creating unproductive jobs in place of the productive jobs they eliminated?
We are at an economic dead-end and those in power are in denial. The truth is our economic problems are due to loose monetary policy, central economic planning, and the parasitic expenses of government. Unless we assess these problems honestly, we unfortunately have a long way to go until, like the junkie, we hit rock bottom.
Stimulus for Whom
On January 26, 2009 Congressman Paul used a weekly web report to lambast the stimulus package a few days before it passed. He called it a further escalation of the same policies that led to the problem in the first place. He stated that the state of fear and threat of impending doom was used to pass legislation that no one would normally support. He then listed a series of red flags he found in the bill.
Stimulus for Whom?
This week the House is expected to pass an $825 billion economic stimulus package. In reality, this bill is just an escalation of a government-created economic mess. As before, a sense of urgency and impending doom is being used to extract mountains of money from Congress with minimal debate. So much for change. This is déjà vu. We are again being promised that its passage will help employment, help homeowners, help the environment, etc. These promises are worthless. This time around especially, Congress should know better than to pass anything of this magnitude without first reading the fine print. There are many red flags that I have found in this bill.
At least $4 billion is allocated to expanding the police state and the war on drugs through Byrne grants, which even the Bush administration opposed, and the COPS program, both of which are corrupt and largely ineffective programs.
To help Big Brother keep a better eye on us and our children, $20 billion would go towards health information technology, which would create a national system of electronic medical records without adequate privacy protection. These records would instead be subject to the misnamed federal “medical privacy” rule, which allows government and state-favored special interests to see medical records at will. An additional $250 million is allocated for states to nationalize individual student data, expanding Federal control of education and eroding privacy.
$79 billion bails out states that haphazardly expanded their budgets during the bubble years, but refuse to retrench and cut back, as their taxpayers have had to, during recession years.
$200 million expands Americorps. $100 million goes to “faith-and-community” based organizations for social services, which will further insinuate the government into charity and community service. Private charities are much more efficient and effective because they are directly accountable to donors, while public programs tend to get rewarded for failure. With its money, the Federal Government brings its incompetence and its whims, while creating foolish dependence. This is sad to see.
Of course the bill is rife with central planning projects. $4 billion for job training, much of which will be used to direct workers into “green jobs”. $200 million to “encourage” electric cars, $2 billion to support US manufacturers of advanced batteries and battery systems, which is yet another function of government I can’t find in the Constitution. Not to mention $500 million for energy efficient manufacturing demonstration projects, $70 million for a Technology Innovation Program for “research in potentially revolutionary technologies” in which government, not supply and demand, will pick winners and losers. $746 million for afterschool snacks, $6.75 billion for the Department of Commerce, including $1 billion for a census.
This bill delivers an additional debt burden of $6,700 to every American man, woman and child.
There is a lot of stimulus and growth in this bill – that is, of government. Nothing in this bill stimulates the freedom and prosperity of the American people. Politician-directed spending is never as successful as market-driven investment. Instead of passing this bill, Congress should get out of the way by cutting taxes, cutting spending, and reining in the reckless monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.
Stimulus will turn Recession into Depression
On February 7, 2009 Congressman Paul appeared on MSNBC and spoke about the recent passage of the stimulus bill in the House and noted his opposition to the bill and explained why it would not work.
On Senate Compromise
On February 7, 2009 Congressman Paul used his weekly web address to speak about the recent "compromise" in the Senate where the bill was reduced from $900 Billion to $787 Billion. He called the bill a spending bill and not a stimulus bill. He re-iterated his opposition to the bill.
Passage of Stimulus in the House
On February 13, 2009 Congressman Paul spoke about the vote on the Bill to pass the version that came back from the Senate. He spoke about the process and the faulty content of the Bill.
Stimulus is a Waste of Money
On February 16, 2009 Congressman Paul appeared on CNN and explained that the stimulus was handled in an extremely poor manner from an ethical stand point. He also stated his opposition to the stimulus itself, noting that spending was the original problem and not going to be the solution. He stated that the bill will delay the recovery and possibly lead to a recession.
Anniversary of the Stimulus
A year after the stimulus bill, Congressman Paul again used his yearly address to speak about the stimulus. He notes the numbers which indicate the failure of the stimulus. He called the goal of the stimulus to grow government.
Government Stimulus, One Year Later
Last week marked the one year anniversary of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, or the stimulus bill, passing into law. While the debate over its success has been focused on whether or not it is stimulating the economy and on various questionable uses of funds, in my estimation this legislation is accomplishing exactly what it was intended to accomplish – grow the government.
Those of us concerned about the ever increasing level of government debt gasped at the astonishing $787 billion cost estimates for this bill. True to form it has actually cost 10 percent more at $862 billion. We heard over and over that government could not sit around and do nothing while people lost their jobs and houses. The administration claimed that unemployment would not go above 8 percent if the stimulus bill passed. Now, a year later, the government estimates that unemployment is over 10 percent. The real number is closer to 20 percent. It appears that those promises were total fabrications in order to close the deal.
In any case, the American people know that more government spending obviously equals more government. If the goal was to strengthen the private sector, Congress would have allowed businesses and individuals to keep more of their own money through meaningful tax cuts. Outrageously, the administration claims that they did “cut taxes” by reducing withholding, and that they have stimulated the private economy by increasing the amount of money in every worker’s paycheck. What they fail to mention is they did not change the total amount of taxes due. This means that all that money not withheld from paychecks will add up to a big unpleasant surprise when returns are filed this year. Many tax preparers are already seeing shocked taxpayers having to come up with big checks to the government when they normally expect a refund. Stimulus, indeed!
The administration also claims that thousands of jobs have been created or saved by this massive spending bill, but these are just more government jobs, and counterproductive in the long run. Funding for the public sector necessarily comes at the expense of an overtaxed private economy. But, it makes sense that government would seek to expand its payroll since every new bureaucrat becomes a likely advocate for big government, when an increasing number of Americans are demanding the opposite. But the more the burden, the closer the government parasite comes to killing its host.
Rather than learning the lessons of the past year, the administration is moving full-speed ahead to do even more economic damage. With the stimulus bill set as a precedent and victory declared, another “jobs” bill is in the works. And, in order to address the unavoidable issues of our massive deficit, the administration has named a bi-partisan commission to find ways to decrease it. Tax increases on the middle class are notoriously back “on the table”, exposing that campaign promise as another instance of merely saying what the people wanted to hear. If the obvious solution to our spending problems was seriously put forth, that is, getting back to the constitutional limitations of government, I would be shocked. More likely, this will be a tactic to increase taxes and spending in a way that passes the political buck.
Voting Record
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Also known as the stimulus, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed the House along mostly party lines 244-188 in January of 2009. Ron Paul voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Ron Paul voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Sponsored and Cosponsored Legislation
This representative has not been identified as sponsoring or cosponsoring significant legislation related to this title.
