I just spent some time acquiring and reading (well actually scanning a lot of the provisions) of HR-1 "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009". It is quite the experience for someone not in politics. I am giving my short review of the actual bill, with some questions. Just like a literary review. This is how I got the bill and what it looked like! You too can get this literary masterwork!
Takeaways:
- whitehouse.gov is an improvement already, but it can still use some cleanup.
- This is a $300 Billion Appropriation Bill and a Tax Cut Bill. Some of the "Tax Cuts" really aren't - they are actually extensions of current tax policy so the numbers reported seem high to me.
- The Health Information Law is just kind of thrown in. Along with the Executive Pay provisions.
- Where are the provisions to connect people looking for work with jobs?
- The bill has some targeting but no clear goals in mind. Even with the clarity provisions. That will have to change.
I wanted to actually look at the Stimulus Bill and how the new government transparency was working, so I went to whitehouse.gov and then clicked on the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" and after some delay, was presented with the link for the Bill which was at the Government Printing Office with a funky cgi link name (why not laws.gpo.gov/2009-hr1 or something?) For some reason the Whitehouse website gave me a warning about leaving. Do they not trust the GPO? One nitpick point, I know the Feds like to use .gov, but I think it would be classy and show the rest of the world some respect if they started using .gov.us or just .us for a domain, at least as an alternate. Anyway some glitches but it was actually quite cool that I could find the text so easy. I settled down with the pdf for some light reading. 407 pages of it.
The first 110 or so pages were appropriations clauses. This was relatively easy to read through. Then this Health Information Technology Bill was plopped in. I am not privy to why, Someone's vote was needed, or it was needed for some other provision? But anyway it sticks out like a sore thumb. After that came the big State Education Money provisions. All in all the first part of 165 pages was somewhat easy to understand. I am sure I misunderstood some, but got the idea.
Then comes the Tax stuff. Why does this always turn into gobbledygook? This was basically unreadable in that it is mostly a list of changes to provisions of previous bills. I wonder how people actually figured out the fiscal impact of this stuff? Page after page of "change 2008 to 2010 here" and change some other provision there. There were tax credits, a lot of state-federal manipulations and provisions for a lot of medical payments.
Tacked on at the end was another non-sequitur, the salary cap provisions for executives taking TARP money. Again a political move including it here but it really is pretty much unrelated to everything else in the bill.
So that is the organization, not as bad as I thought actually. What about the contents?
Sometimes it was hard to tell what the money was really going for in the Appropriations section, especially with the transportation stuff. One problem even with this is that the actual spending provisions are mixed with Loans and Loan Guarantees. Loans are still money out but Loan guarantees, unless you are reserving the entire amount aren't, so they exaggerate the amount spent slightly. I put all the appropriations clauses in a spreadsheet and it looks like $297 Billion total with almost $5 Billion in Loans mostly to Western Area Power Authority for Power Lines and almost $15 Billion in Loan Guarantees - Rural Housing Service and DOE Title 17 mainly.
Nothing really struck me here. This was all quick stuff. No jump out at me amazing programs. Inspector General's in the various agencies got almost $200 Million for oversight, about half a percent of appropriations. Sounds about right. The thing is, some of these provisions seem like they would have been in the budget anyway, so I wonder what the net of this really was? Probably things were pushed up to get the money out quick. Lots of "120 day plan needed" clauses. Where are all the Energy Conservation construction people going to come from? There is education included, but who is going to teach and where? Seems like current workers will get piled on a lot. I'd like to be in that position!
The Tax stuff is much harder to categorize. I do think that the way this pakage was reported as $797 billion (or whatever) is odd. Look for example at the Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit. This bill just keeps it the way it is for three more years, but is marked as over $10 billion in some reports. It really is nothing. It keeps the status quo the way it is. There are a number of provisions that are just extensions of current policy. I don't know how to calculate what these were "valued" at, but really the fiscal impact is zero. I'm not saying these aren't good things! The PTC is great and caused a doubling of Wind Generation in 2 years, but they are making this bill look bigger than it really is unless I am misunderstanding, which is a possibility.
I would love to have some site that breaks this out a little more. I am sure it is out there. Please chime in!
There are many energy credits and other tax cuts and credits with targeted goals. Second there are huge sections describing Cobra and "struggling family" tax credits and such, All well and good but there seems to be a hole in this stimulus that I find odd as in a sense it is its whole purpose. We are having staggering numbers of people looking for work now, freshly unemployed or coming back to the workforce for whatever reason. (like me) Where are the provisions to link these people to the jobs? It is like the Bill wants to spend money and use trickle down to have the jobs get filled. Looking at the provisions I think a lot of the "jobs" in this bill will actually be jobs saved but not actually putting people to work. States are being held to task to show some job creation, but personally I think the focus shouldn't be there but actually on the ever growing number of unemployed people. I don't care that the states have to show something, I want to see opportunities myself (in my opinion anyway!) There ought to be a recovery-jobs.gov.us link site or something. Then you could really say people were being connected! This would have private sector and public sector jobs related to this package. and some resources to connect people. I think this will be more needed as millions more become unemployed in the next several months. Unemployment compensation is a major focus of the money. It is true that this is a quick way to address unemployment in the bill, so in that regard this Bill seems like it is taking the right approach.
There is a Broadband Technologies section and the Salary Cap section popped on to the end of this plan but they aren't too stimulating. There was very little cruft like this as far as I could understand compared to some appropriations bills. As an outsider, fairly clean. I am sure there are issues in the details in there. The thing is this Bill has many reporting and "clarity" conditions in it on how the money is spent but I still don't know what is is supposed to do other than spend money. Now that is its real goal but here are some questions since these targets are not in the Bill:
- How much energy will retrofitting all these buildings save next year and so on? What is the target there?
- How much less will the capital load for school building upgrades be - what was expected before and what will it be after this stuff is done?
- What is a target for non-fossil energy? How much more of our energy will be renewable from this?
- What areas will be economically feasible for power generation due to the new power lines?
- Electronic medical records are good but what is the point exactly here? What will this help? There are a lot of things I think but what is the focus?
- I see the provisons for reporting jobs but when will they disappear?
There are places giving much of this, but this is personal feeling when reading. I hope these overarching goals are strongly pushed. Change Acceleration is pushed from the top in existing organizations. There ought to be a scorecard for this and all major bills at whitehouse.gov with progress. Deciding what to put on there would be a good exercise I think! What does the administration think its big operational goals are and where are we? In a dashboard format!
Energy and Health care are obviously big issues for the new Administration as you could see the table being set for the future. I think we are going to have to spend a lot more money than this to get the gears moving, Fiscal responsibility is one thing but 20 or 30 million people without jobs is another. But that is me. Will we have large work programs rivaling CCC and WPA in the next couple years as the the jobs and wealth keep disappearing?
Overall this was a good quick shot, but it isn't what I think will be the long term. If you are going to have huge government programs then you need big goals as well and this is where the Stimulus is just a stimulus. Personally I would like to see things like: Here is a program to get 50% of ALL energy use as non-fossil fuel in 20 years and here are the big bucks to do it. We want health care costs to be distributed away from jobs and spread out like an insurance problem should be. So here is the goal - Detach Health insurance from jobs. And here is the plan. And so on. We want a land use and recovery plan that is ecologically feasible and it will take half a million people - here is the new national guard. Perhaps mandatory national service. Whatever. Some of these are crackpot but just as examples.
I am so sick of the quick soundbites and am trying to actually spend some time looking at these things. I think we'll see some more and more radical and convoluted legislation as time goes by. With modern technology and real openness this could be the new reading fad.