Tag Archives: infrastructure

President, Congress on a Spending Spree

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  APR 4, 2021

A White House summary of its new infrastructure plan before it was unveiled put the total price tag at 2 trillion, 251 billion dollars.

But the media and most others talking about it had already rounded off the figure to an easy to read, easy to say $2 trillion. In other words, to keep things simple they lopped off $251billion. I remember Senator Ev Dirkson’s popular refrain: “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon we’re talking about real money.”

Do you have any idea how many trips around the Moon it would be if you laid 251 billion dollars end to end? Neither do I, but I did some rough calculations. If you divided it among every American who received a stimulus check this year each would get $1,976. The defense department could buy 19 Gerald R. Ford nuclear class aircraft carriers. The total defense budget in 2000 was $293 billion. How about 5 billion, 20 million hot meals at $50 apiece? You could buy every team in the four major sports leagues-baseball, football, basketball, and hockey and have enough left over for two more aircraft carriers. You could buy Finland. Continue reading →

The Business of Business

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

“The chief business of the American people is business.”

Calvin Coolidge said that to a group of newspaper editors in 1925, smack dab in the middle of the Roaring 20’s, a decade of brisk economic growth. It was also in the middle of a huge stock market bubble (a bubble which would collapse four years later).

Coolidge summarized perfectly both the Republican and the business sector’s approach to government. Get the government out of the way and let business take care of the people through greater prosperity. Continue reading →