There are several things which I believe after spending close to forty years in and out of Washington. The first is that a lot of this stimulus money is going to be wasted. There is no way you can put so much money so quickly into the government’s hands and expect it to go smoothly. There will be fraud; there will be waste; there will be incompetence; there will be too much bureaucracy; and there will be rules and regulations that keeps the money from going where it should in a timely fashion. Look at the money for infrastructure. It is easy to sign a contract to do a project in 30 days. However, most projects require a series of approvals at the city, county and state level which can take from six to twenty-four months. Very few projects nationwide are properly permitted and ready to turn the first shovel of dirt next week. Furthermore, it is not near as much money as people think. For instance in Florida the $787 billion package allots only $35 billion for transportation related infrastructure projects. This means that Florida’s share would be $1.7 billion for transportation, not the $7.4 billion wish list of shovel ready projects that Florida’s state officials had prepared in anticipation of a big federal windfall.

Some of the money goes for good purposes but does not create jobs. For instance, $50 million to maintain and modernize the Farm Service Agency information technology system, $200 million for the Rural Housing Insurance Program, $750 million for nutrition programs, and $295 million for the cost of state administrative expenses for nutrition programs. Very few people can argue that the spending is not needed. However, one wonders if this should be handled in separate legislation and not in a bill that is supposed to create jobs.

Other countries are also passing stimulus packages. A proposed German stimulus package of $50 billion Euros; has $17.3 billion Euros devoted entirely to building and improving infrastructure. Seventy percent of the $17.3 billion will be spent at the municipal level where it is believed the rapid disbursement will have the greatest positive impact. There is also an interesting provision which pays German car owners $2,500.00 Euro for scraping their old gas guzzlers and buying energy efficient new models. However about 2/3 of the funds will be invested in day care centers, kindergartens, schools, universities, hospitals, faster internet networks etc. The Germans, like us, have their share of non job producing spending.

I believe the Obama Administration has learned a tough lesson from the stimulus bill. The President let Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House start this process. That was a mistake. The House put many provisions in the bill that had nothing to do with jobs and were pet projects of Democratic members that had been sitting around for many years waiting for the right opportunity. Once the stimulus bill passed the House, President Obama and the Senate could only modify the legislation. One wonders whether the President’s Chief of Staff, former Congressman Rahm Emanuel, is too close to his friends in the House and didn’t protect the President sufficiently. Hopefully President Obama will have more of a direct impact on any new stimulus legislation before it gets to the House.

We have changed our philosophy of government and economics. Once you are headed in a direction where government is the key to our economic survival it is hard to make a change. It is like turning an aircraft carrier; you have to start a long way before your turning point, and you don’t turn very fast.

This was not a bipartisan bill. The Republicans were frozen out. It received no Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate. Part of the reason the Republicans were frozen out is they had done that to the Democrats in the time they had control of the House of Representatives. Any real hope of bipartisanship died and this animosity will carry over for the rest of the session. There are going to be many other key issues in front of the Congress which will get tied up in this partisanship which I believe will only get worse.

The American people will probably give members of both parties a pass no matter how they voted on the stimulus bill for the moment. The approval rating of Congress has “risen” to 31% in some polls. However, this vote will play a prominent part in the 2010 elections. It is anybody’s guess which party it will help. The economy will dictate the results.

Finally, maybe there is some hope as we seem to be fixated on “non-economic” issues and not the recession. The problems of baseball players Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez, steroids in all sports, the Octuplets’ Mom Nadya Suleman, or the Casey Anthony case seems to get as much attention and interest as the recession. I guess the Romans were right – keep the circus at the coliseum going and keep the gladiators fighting, and the populace can be kept under control.

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Lou Frey represented Central Florida in the U. S. Congress from 1969 to 1979. In his last election, he received nearly 80% of the vote. He was elected one of five Republican leaders in the House of Representatives during the 93rd and 94th Congress. He served on...