what Congress bought itself with $1 billion of taxpayer $

[Black Ruby]

The last 6 months of 2009 and first 3 of 2010.
http://www.aolnews.com/house-money/article/the-other-congressional-spending-how-the-house-spent-1-billion-on-itself/19522761

[sandpit]

I think this topic, though not specifically this article, came up in another thread recently, and MostPost was shooting holes in some of my over-consumption diatribe. Plain and simple, these clowns have no idea how to be financially responsible, yet we re-elect them time and time again. We have no one but ourselves to blame.

[Tom]

Drunken sailors are complaining about the spending.
Congress (dems) votes to pay as you go.
They want to extend unemployment, but not pay for it.
Repubs try to force them to pay for it, like maybe getting the money from some of this BS stuff.
Obama says repubs are against the unemployed people.

Do we really need any of these clowns?

Vote out all incumbents every election.

[Black Ruby]

Drunken sailors are complaining about the spending.
Congress (dems) votes to pay as you go.
They want to extend unemployment, but not pay for it.
Repubs try to force them to pay for it, like maybe getting the money from some of this BS stuff.
Obama says repubs are against the unemployed people.

Do we really need any of these clowns?

Vote out all incumbents every election.

Well, I'm definitely for term limits and voting out incumbents since we don't have term limits. And why in the hell shoud they get pensions?

But it's really sleazy of my neighbor Mitch to give AIG $180 billion of taxpayer bucks then grandstand on approving 1/5 of that amount to the unemployed, when I'm pretty sure that they'll at least spend it, putting it back in the economy.

You'd think that the racetrack owners were running the government, too, as bad a job as the gummint is doing.

[DJofSD]

Coval was on Kudlow's program on Wednesday. He published this (http://www.people.hbs.edu/cmalloy/pdffiles/envaloy.pdf) study in March. In it he states that government spending has a negative impact on corporate spending.

VI. Conclusion
This paper provides a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of
government spending on the private sector. Using changes in congressional committee
chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures, we
find that fiscal spending shocks appear to significantly dampen corporate sector
investment activity. Specifically, we find statistically and economically significant
evidence that firms respond to government spending shocks by: i.) reducing investments
in new capital, ii.) reducing investments in R&D, and iii.) paying out more to
shareholders in the face of this reduced investment opportunity set. Further, we find
that when the spending shocks reverse (through a relinquishing of chairmanship), most all
of these behaviors reverse. Finally, we also find some evidence that firms scale back their
employment, and experience a decline in sales growth.