Analyzing Obama's State of the Union and Budget

Two important events took place this week: President Obama proposed his budget and he delivered his first message to Congress. A Los Angeles Times article noted that Obama's budget "included broad goals and few line items", and the same could pretty much be said for his speech. The three issues he focused on were energy, health care and education. On the face of it, none of those issues are infrastructure. In fact, there was less about infrastructure in Obama's speech than in the speech of Louisiana governor Kenneth Parcell, er, Bobby Jindal. Jindal criticized Obama and Congress' massive appropriation for infrastructure, highlighting the Anaheim-to-Las Vegas high speed rail project (More on that in a future post). Infrastructure made its main entrance in Obama's speech subtly in the energy and education, where Obama highlighted his green energy plans and singled out a crumbling school in Dillon, SC.

Full Text of Obama's Address to Congress

Looking at Obama's budget, the first thing Republicans, including David Brooks, cry foul about is that its percentage of GDP inches us closer to Europe. (To that, I counter that we NEED massive gov't spending in ALL AREAS. This morning's LA Times had an interesting schematic showing the differences in funding between Obama's budget and the last Bush budget. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it on the 'Net. I will note, however, the most important difference to funding--an increase in the outlay to the Department of Transportation by more than $60B, with much of that increase coming in the stimulus package.

I Wonder, Wonder, Wonder, What's in this Wonder Bill?

As you've undoubtedly heard, the stimulus bill has passed both houses of Congress, passing in the House with no Republican support, and in the Senate with the support of only three blue-state Republicans. This means that Boehner's gamble has paid off in the House, but the stimulus bill will have to be percieved as a failure for it to pay off completely. Seven blue-dog Democrats defected, and hopefully they'll be primaried out in 2010. In analysis on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, syndicated columnist Mark Shields thinks that it was a major success for Obama and the American people, while New York Times correspondent David Brooks thinks that too many people are not satisfied with this bill. The Los Angeles Times, and the author of this blog, tend to side with Shields on this one, pointing out that the stimulus even the Republicans concede that the bill will create or preserve at least 3.46 million jobs. The author would like to add that one important function of this bill is creating jobs in every industry, yes, including the arts industry. View NPR Coverage.

Here's a visual that shows what's in this "Wonder Bill". As you can see, $85.7 billion (or about $300 for each person in America) is allocated towards infrastructure. Of this, $46B is allocated towards fixing our highway network, and get almost $10B apiece.

Now that the stimulus bill has been passed, the direction of this blog will change slightly, to how infrastructure spending is being used to help the economy, or how lack of infrastructure spending is hurting the economy.

This blog post is brought to you by Nestle.