But Republicans were incredibly critical of similar proposals such as the ones you suggested (well at least analogous to what you suggest) on how to make medical treatment more efficient in this country since costs are so out of control.
A lot of people are saying that what you are suggesting (which I'm not saying are bad ideas) ARE bad ideas. So essentially proposals like yours would have run into the same roadblocks that Obama's did. For whatever reason, people were getting hard-ons for orange road cones and new highways and didn't think anything except those should count as stimulus. So I think we agree in principle, although I do not think it would be wise to limit a stimulus to things just like those.
I honestly think the current "scattershot" approach was the best that could have been done as it is spread out among the market and has less risks of being completely ineffective in case the money went to the wrong places.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
