Where is the Money Going?
What’s in the Stimulus Bill?: Infrastructure
The new stimulus bill (aka the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009”) includes $98.3 billion for transportation and infrastructure. The biggest ticket item is $26.7 billion to go to the Federal Highway Administration to give grants to s... read more
What’s in the Stimulus Bill?: Tax Cuts
To hear its critics talk about it, you would think that the just-passed stimulus bill (aka the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009”) was a wild-eyed liberal trick full of wasteful spending. In fact, the $789 billion bill includes $280 ... read more
Banks Gave $1.8 Million to Congressmen Who “Grilled” Them
It made for great theater: the heads of eight banks that received $166 billion in bailout funds being grilled and tongue-lashed by members of Congress channeling the public’s anger. But if most of the members of the House Financial Services Commit... read more
Merrill Lynch Gave Million-Dollar Bonuses to 696 Executives
Merrill Lynch quietly paid out bonuses of at least $1 million each to 696 top executives while the investment house was suffering terminal losses last year, an investigation by the New York state Attorney General's office revealed.
This was pa... read more
Comparing the Stimulus Bills
Now that the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed their own version of stimulus bills, their leaders will meet to iron out differences in the two bills. The Senate bill includes $117.6 billion more in tax cuts for individuals and fa... read more
Defense Contractors Spent $340,000 to Honor Defense Sec. Gates
According to recent Congressional filings, Pentagon contractors, their lobbyists and lobbying groups spent more than $340,000 in 2008 on parties and other events to honor Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Among those paying for events honoring Ga... read more
Senate Stimulus Plan Slips in $1 Billion for Nuclear Weapons
There has been so much discussion of what the Senate is cutting from the House version of the economic stimulus plan that it is easy to overlook the fact that the Senate version also adds new expenditures. Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughsh... read more
Gone From the Stimulus Bill
As members of Congress continue to wrangle about what to cut from the soon-to-be-enacted stimulus bill, some details have emerged as to what has already been eliminated. Among the expenditures considered not stimulating enough to be funded:
$16 b... read more
Taxpayers Scammed for $78 Billion
On October 20, 2008, then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, in explaining how the bailout of banks and others would work, told Americans that “This is an investment, not an expenditure, and there is no reason to expect this program will cos... read more
TARP Recipients Paid $114 Million to Candidates and Lobbyists
The struggling companies whose unrestricted business practices have contributed to the country's economic crisis are getting an impressive return on at least one of their investments.
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has found th... read more
Obama’s Executive Pay Cap…The Loopholes
President Obama’s announcement of a $500,000-a-year pay cap for executives of firms receiving bailout funds seems an appropriate response to public outrage about Wall Street excesses. However, as so often happens when money meets politics, there a... read more
Bailout Banks Lending Less than Other Banks
Think back just a few months ago when President Bush, his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, and Ben Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, threw the nation into a panic because the entire economy was days away from collapse. Fortunatel... read more
An Old Word Returns: Bankster
Every now and then a word that has gone out of fashion earns the right to be revived. A perfect example is the Depression-era word “bankster,” which combines the words “banker” and “gangster.” “Bankster” found its first public use in the September... read more
The Rich Really Have Gotten Richer
During the first six years of the administration of President George W. Bush, the 400 richest Americans saw their average income double to $263.3 million, thanks, in part, to the fact that their tax rate dropped by a third to 17.2%. The biggest g... read more
Crisis? What Crisis? Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Profit in U.S. History
The year 2008 may have been a bad one for most Americans, with layoffs and foreclosures and bank failures rippling through the economy, but for Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, there was reason for joy. Exxon posted an... read more
Give Each American $3,000: Linda Chavez
Linda Chavez presents a simple, but radical alternative to the $819 billion Democratic stimulus package: give every man, woman and child $3,000 in credit that has to be spent within 18 months. This would cost $900 billion, “But unlike the Democrat... read more