PrairiePundit

 Washington Free Beacon: Amid reports that the government sent stimulus checks to terrorists and death row inmates, a Republican congressman is demanding a full accounting of how much taxpayer money has gone to America's most dangerous criminals. Rep. Don Bacon (R., Neb.) this month wrote to IRS commissioner Charles Rettig on how stimulus checks, officially referred to as Economic Impact Payments (EIP), were sent to "incarcerated individuals." One of the individuals who received a check is Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is serving several life sentences in federal prison. Bacon asked the IRS to disclose how many payments were made to inmates and specifically how many of those inmates were on death row. The Nebraska Republican also wants information on how the money was transferred. Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) warned in March 2021 that terrorists, including Tsarnaev, would receive the taxpayer-funded stimulus checks. Fact-checkers initially panned Cotton...

  Brad Polumbo: Flashback: Federal Government Lost 5x More to Stimulus Fraud than it Spent Developing COVID Vaccines Where are the prosecutions for this theft?  Instead, they are wasting prosecutorial resources on Jan. 6 trespass and "parading" cases. 

 Breitbart: Americans struggling to survive on federal benefits have waited weeks for word on their share of the $1.9 trillion stimulus. Some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens have been  waiting  weeks for the next round of promised financial aid from President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “ American Rescue Plan ” coronavirus relief package, with no indication of when it would come. Chief among those are the millions of elderly Americans who depend on federal assistance to survive. As of March 24, nearly 30 million had yet to  receive  their portion, largely because the Social Security Administration had “not sent the necessary payment files” to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Despite a March 12  assurance  the money would be  delivered  “shortly,” weeks passed before the IRS had access to the necessary information to follow through. “To me, ‘shortly’ is two to three days, not two weeks,” 65-year-old Floridian retiree Mark Stevens...

 Washington Examiner Editorial: On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy added nearly 400,000 jobs on net in February. The unemployment rate dropped to 6.2%, even as governments shed 86,000 jobs. The number of people quitting jobs increased, evincing increased confidence on the part of workers that opportunities are available. And the number of discouraged workers, those dropping out of the labor force due to a lack of jobs, plunged by 16%. These data point to a national economy that is on pace for a full recovery. Indeed, it is quite impressive that such strong numbers are possible even as some large states, such as New York and California, persist with unnecessary and ineffective coronavirus-related lockdowns of their economies. Amid all this good news is a message for President Biden, if he dare listen. A booming job market signifies that the economy has already been stimulated enough. ... The Democrats' problem is that they are control freaks and they do n...

  Washington Examiner: Democrats tighten stimulus check limits in bid to smooth passage of $1.9 trillion spending bill They have messed around on this bill so long that it no longer looks like an emergency measure to many voters.  There is also the fact, that they have added so much Democrat crap to the bill that beneficiaries look like pawns in a Democrat giveaway to their constituency. 

 Epoch Times: A bipartisan group of 16 senators told the Biden administration’s top  CCP (Chinese Communist Party)  virus official Sunday that the administration’s  pandemic  relief proposal  does not  focus enough on low-income families. The senators set up a conference call,  organized  by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), with Jeff Zients, Biden’s coronavirus coordinator, and Louisa Terrell, head of White House legislative affairs on Sunday afternoon. It was apparently the first dialogue between the centrist group and the Biden administration. Manchin has been skeptical of the purpose of a third stimulus check and voiced opposition to a proposed $2,000 payment plan in early January. “How is the money that we invest now going to help us best to get jobs back and get people employed? And I can’t tell you that sending another check out is gonna do that to a person that’s already got a check,” Manchin told CNN on Jan. 10. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine...

 Washington Examiner: House lawmakers in both parties voted Monday to increase the amount of money provided in a new round of federal stimulus checks, agreeing with a request from President Trump to bolster direct payments aimed at helping individuals and families during the pandemic. The measure would provide $2,000 to individuals and $4,000 for couples, which is significantly higher than the $600 for individuals and $1,200 for couples provided in a relief measure Congress passed this month. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has not signaled whether he will bring up the House bill, but it’s unlikely to win much GOP support because it does not include new offers and would simply add to the deficit. Trump signed the coronavirus aid package and government funding bill Sunday but sent it back to Congress with a request to bolster the checks to $2,000 and rescind some of the spending. The $900 billion package was bundled with a $1.4 trillion measure that fu...

 Epoch Times: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) signaled that they are open to increasing the amount for the stimulus checks after President Donald Trump threatened to veto the COVID relief bill unless the direct payment was increased to $2,000 per individual. “Republicans repeatedly refused to say what amount the President wanted for direct checks. At last, the President has agreed to $2,000—Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it!” Pelosi wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “We spent months trying to secure $2,000 checks but Republicans blocked it. Trump needs to sign the bill to help people and keep the government open and we’re glad to pass more aid Americans need. Maybe Trump can finally make himself useful and get Republicans not to block it again,” Schumer wrote on Twitter shortly after Pelosi issued her message. In a video message issued earlier on Tuesday, the president thre...

Monica Showalter: New stimulus analysis shows Obama never understood investment ... What a creepy thing to think it was Obama who managed the greatest portfolio out there: the U.S. Treasury. This guy couldn't invest to save Soros. He was a colossally bad investor, just as President Trump is a fairly good one – and who by contrast just happens to be cutting bureaucratic fat, waste, fraud, and useless regulations as the U.S. economy, by a weird coincidence to the left, booms, and the U.S. debt goes down. This is what an investorly take on a budget looks like. Obama had none of that good sense. What's fun about the piece is that Black isn't at all ideological in his analysis. He's purely a market guy. He points out that stimulus as a result of taking on debt really can work, and has, citing two great examples from relatively recent history that paid off: the Louisiana Purchase, which yielded an exponential return on the $300-million investment for the U.S. ec...

Daily Mail: Nancy Pelosi's brother-in-law is given $737m of taxpayers' money to build giant solar power plant in middle of the desert Obama administration approved $1bn in green energy loans days after failed Solyndra project due to be completed $737m handed to Crescent Dunes project in Tonopah, Nevada, for 110-megawatt desert solar power plant Investors include firm Minority leader's brother-in-law and major Solyndra stakeholder Republicans warn Energy Department is 'rushing' $5bn in loans ahead of Friday deadline    This story is from September of 2011, but it shows how the failed Obama stimulus plan was classic cronyism that produced investments of dubious quality based on attempting to pick winners and losers rather than allowing market forces to work. My recollection of this plant is that it manage to fry any birds who flew over it.

Breitbart: The jobs market is red hot right now. American businesses added 235,000 jobs in February, ADP and Moody’s Analytics said Wednesday. January’s private sector payroll number was revised upward to 244,000 from the initial report of 234,000. That was far more than the 195,000 expected by economists. ... The rest of the media finds this story inconvenient to their narrative.  But cutting regulations and cutting taxes does appear to be a better stimulus program than giving government money to Democrat interests groups the way Obama did.

Charles Ortel: ... It wasn't "easy being green" for GE under Obama Under Jeff Immelt from March 2009 through his departure in 2017, GE's directors, executives, and professional advisers evidently learned little from their "near-death" experience. Perhaps Immelt should have spent less time working with President Obama and more time on his day job at GE. Early on, Immelt cheered the Obama administration's reckless attempt to stimulate the American economy by throwing almost a trillion dollars toward unvetted plans. By 2011, after doling out hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to finance "infrastructure" projects that, in theory, were primed for action, Immelt and President Obama actually thought it was funny that "shovel-ready jobs" and private-sector incomes did not materialize as originally promised. A full reckoning is overdue, especially if we wish to learn from mistakes made during the Obama years "managing...

Washington Free Beacon Obama Program Made $729 Million in Erroneous Payments to Doctors Stimulus program to incentivize using electronic health records 'vulnerable to abuse' Sad to say, but this might just be a rounding error in a compilation of all the money Obama wasted on stimulus programs.

Washington Times: A coalition of liberal activists and Democratic lawmakers has launched a national campaign against President Trump ’s infrastructure program that accuses him of attempting to privatize the country’s highways, bridges and other public assets. There’s one problem: The federal government doesn’t own most of that stuff. By one measure, state and local governments and the private sector own 97 percent of the nation’s nondefense infrastructure, and they fund 94 percent of it, according to a report by Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute . The report examined data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis that showed the federal government owned $1.5 trillion of nondefense infrastructure, compared with $10.1 trillion for state and local governments and $40.7 trillion for the private sector. Still, the Millions of Jobs Coalition is looking for at least $1 trillion of direct federal spending to repair and replace American infrastruc...

Bloomberg: Energy Projects Worth $50 Billion Are Stalled Until Trump Fills Empty Posts With Trump's policy of encouraging investment in US infrastructure and energy development, it is surprising he has not been able to find anyone to fill these positions.  It should be a priority.  These projects would also create jobs.

Stephen Moore: Back in early 2015 oil and gas company Conoco -Phillips requested a permit from the Obama administration to launch an oil drilling project in Alaska. The energy project, called the Greater Moose’s Tooth Development, is located within the National Petroleum Reserve and would create thousands of jobs in an economically depressed area of the state. The project has the full approval of the local community, and poses little threat to the environment in a sparsely populated region. It is a multi-billion dollar jobs and infrastructure project with roads and housing and pipelines. It won’t cost the federal taxpayers a penny to build. In fact the royalties from the project will likely raise hundreds of millions of tax dollars for the federal government and the state. A no-brainer, right? Not exactly. For years the Obama administration has tangled up the project in regulatory red tape. “We are ready to break ground on day one after we get the permit,” a frustrated Connoco-P...

Fox News: How did federal agency get $500M from stimulus? ‘We misled Congress,’ ex-official says Hey, its in Maryland so what did you expect?  Democrats were so eager to use the financial crisis they caused by their terrible housing policies as an excuse to through public money at Democrat boondoggles.

Fuel Fix: Saudi Arabia’s run at U.S. oil-company profits could inadvertently drive down costs in the shale oil patch, making the high-cost business more competitive, a Barclays analyst says. For now, though, U.S. oil producers and oil field service firms are expected to cut deep into the North American shale boom. Oil spending in the United States and Canada could fall by as much as $58 billion this year if petroleum prices remain at current low levels, according to a Barclays survey released Friday. That would be a 30 percent cut to last year’s estimated $196.1 billion in spending, largely driven by a retreat from zealous spending among North American oil companies. Barclays says, however, the cut is a moving target: Oil prices have fallen rapidly over the last four weeks as the British bank was collecting input from 225 companies. “They all know they’re staring down a cliff, they just don’t know how far it goes yet,” said Dave Anderson, an oilfield service and equipment analyst a...

NY Times: Government Spending, Edging Up, Is a Stimulus Across the nation, state and local governments are spending on projects that were stalled, and even some federal spending is rising. It should be clear by now that government spending is not that great a stimulus. The nearly trillion wasted on the Obama stimulus has added debt and become a drag on the economy.   What really stimulated the economy in recent years is private investment in energy production which the government actually opposed.  That has resulted in abundant supplies of energy at cheaper prices which will also help grow the economy. The US could get more private sector investment if it would revise it tax code an free up the foreign earnings of American companies from confiscatory rates.

Ben Howe: Obama’s Own Stimulus Predictions Show We’d Have Been Better Off Without It Obama's recent claims about the stimulus are just another part of his politic of fraud.  You would have to be a psychopath to make such statements in the face of the administrations' on projections and the obvious failure of liberal economics.