Scott Powers The Sun-Sentinel

May 24, 2011

Scott Powers
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

RE” “After 2 Years $4.6 Billion Is Still Not Spent” – Some questions on your Page4 1 story on the Stimulus Program and its supposed legatee, Shovel Ready Projects.

Mr. Powers,

2 ½ years ago, despite 8 years of admonitions from then Senator Clinton about the dangers of borrowing money from the Chinese, we lay prostrate before Wong, our inscrutable Mandarin – What’s the Chinese word for loanshark? – lender, to finance the still unrealized Summer of Recovery.

Now you tell me that $4,600,000,000 of the monies earmarked for Florida still haven’t been spent.

#1 – Exactly where is the money? Don’t say it’s in the pipeline. It isn’t. It is an account somewhere. Whose name is on the account?

#2 – Federal Highway, south of the tunnel, Route 1 to vacationers, has had 4 blocks of what appeared to be well maintained medians torn up. Is their repair part of the Shovel Ready Projects part of the Stimulus Program? In a bit more than 2 ½ years this country designed, built, and tested an atomic weapon. If it is part of the SPSRP – that’s short for Stimulus Program Shovel Ready Projects – why did it take 2 ½ years to get some back hoes to crack the concrete? Weren’t we told that it would take about 10 days for the infrastructure, the aging infrastructure, to spring back to life? Does it take 2 ½ years for a shovel ready project to become, y’know what I’m saying, shovel ready?

#3 Why is a job in the public sector worth more than a job in the private sector? If you cut a private sector employee won’t he bleed as much as a public sector employee? Doesn’t he have to feed his children at least as much as a public sector employee? Whatever happened to “equal protection under the law”? I would be shocked, shocked if I were to find out that politics and the public employee unions had something to do with it.

#4 – One of my favorite political pundits, Samuel Johnson, said that “any public policy that involvers robbing Peter to pay Paul will always have Paul’s support”. Sound advice in the 18th century; still good today.






#5 – Do you know if China has a Powerball lottery? Do you think we can buy some tickets before they realize that they are lending us the money to gamble? If we win do we have a choice of currency?

The President said in February, 2009 that “there was an election. We won.”

There is still one coming up, isn’t there?






Kevin Smith