Stimulus = Welfare + Quotas + Corruption
Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is now being used to force states to adopt racial quotas in government contracts, even if their state constitution or civil-rights laws forbid such quotas. Slate’s Mickey Kaus reports that “CalTrans, the huge state agency that spends billions in federal highway construction funds, ‘sets a quota of having 6.75 percent of contracts go to women or members of a targeted group–African American, Asian-Pacific American, and Native American.'”
The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had actually fought against welfare reform as an Illinois legislator.
Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.
Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.
At least four states (California, Michigan, Nebraska, and Louisiana) have state constitutions that ban racial set asides, but most of those bans contain exceptions for racial set-asides that are requirements for receiving federal funds. No such exception exists to the California Equal Rights Amendment, which was construed in Connerly v. State Personnel Board (2001) to bar gender-based set-asides even when they are permitted under federal law.