The recovery plan: shock & awe for a shaken nation
 

WASHINGTON – America is bringing shock and awe to the home front, using dollars instead of bombs.

It's the military doctrine of lightning force — fast and brute, or as brute as the shaken country can manage — applied to the campaign for economic recovery.

With a record-busting stimulus plan, the U.S. is marshaling resources against economic catastrophe in ways not seen since Franklin Roosevelt put the New Deal in motion.

President Barack Obama is going with the best deal he could get. The stimulus bill is a landmark legislative achievement for a new president who inherited economic spoilage along with the spoils of power. Now the nation anxiously waits to see if it works.

Undermining federal balance sheets that were already deeply in the red, Obama and Congress settled on a nearly $800 billion plan that aims to spend more on the crisis at hand than the government has spent waging the Iraq war for six years.

The stimulus plan will mean thousands of dollars in tax breaks for first-time home buyers and people buying new cars. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers will get an extra $13 a week in their paychecks this year, and about $8 a week next year. Unemployment checks will go up $25 a week, and keep coming longer. Food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans will rise. Short-term health insurance will become more affordable for many losing their jobs.


The enormity of the package left politicians grasping for concrete ways to convey its size.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., spoke of a stack of hundred-dollar bills 689 miles high, and of bills wrapped side-by-side that would encircle the Earth nearly 39 times. House Republicans predicted that the package's costs — with interest on the necessary borrowing — could total more than a trillion dollars, enough money to buy about 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every American.

It was enough to prompt comic Jon Stewart to riff that if you sewed the $100 bills together, "you would make a blanket for Jupiter."

Forty percent of Americans already have been affected by some sort of job problem in the past year, be it unemployment, underemployment, layoffs, reductions in pay or hours, or job losses by members of their households, according to a poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center. Fifty-six percent expect things to be worse or about the same a year from now — and they've got solid grounds for their pessimism.

The country could well suffer a net loss of 2 million to 3 million or more jobs this year, economists believe. And the unemployment rate, now 7.6 percent, could top 9 percent by spring of 2010.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090214/...timulus_stakes

Re: The recovery plan: shock & awe for a shaken nation
 

:winksmiley02::winksmiley02:One of the mainstream newspapers here in the U.k.
(the Guardian) has been carrying articles regarding tax havens. I have only seen one article which was on the Cayman Is. but it was a two page spread - lots of information -

including on the Carlyle Group with which
apparently the Bush family are associated.

Interesting that the mainstream media are
beginning to research down this path.

If Obama carries out his stated intention
to do something about tax havens it
should bring forth some interesting
information.