The numbers are breathtaking.
Four hundred and seven pages in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act represent allocations of more than $800 billion - not far short of a trillion.
Scroll down Page 17, for example, and you see allocations for science, aeronautics, exploration and cross agency support for NASA - totaling $1 billion.
There's $3 billion for the National Science Foundation before you reach Page 18.
It's all separate from the $12.1 trillion bailout commitment, as stated by The New York Times, and the $410 billion in the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, as stated in the GOP.gov legislative digest.
U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster, R-9th District, said according to someone he talked to, the amount spent on the stimulus would have been enough to pay off 80 to 90 percent of household mortgages throughout the country.
"A billion here, 200 billion there," he said. "I have trouble wrapping my brain around a billion."
Drawbacks
to the plan
Shuster voted against the stimulus and doesn't believe it will work because it doesn't focus on core issues, he said.
No wonder, because it didn't get proper vetting before passage, he said.
"Nobody read this thing," he said. It came out in the middle of the night, and there were only a few hours until the vote, he said.
Shuster says the Republican counterproposal would have created twice the number of jobs - 4 million in all - and up to three times the infrastructure investment.
The Democratic plan that became law shrunk stimulus benefits for buying cars from an average of $3,200 to $1,500, and also shrunk the tax credit for home buyers from $15,000 to $7,500, he said.
It also failed to target small businesses with tax breaks, he said.
State Sen. John H. Eichelberger Jr., R-Blair, also has problems with the stimulus.
He authored a letter signed by four other senators and presented recently to Gov. Ed Rendell, arguing that the state should refuse stimulus allocations that cost more than their face amount; that force the state to change policies or laws; and/or conflict with the constitution.
An allocation of $290 million for unemployment compensation may ultimately cost $330 million because it changes the law and expands benefit requirements, Eichelberger said.
An educational allocation could force unwanted policy changes because of onerous "strings," he said.
And a provision that the money gets spent by the governor could conflict with a constitutional requirement that lawmakers have a say in such expenditures, Eichelberger said.
He doesn't have a problem with money that goes through "a process," like stimulus funds PennDOT will use, he said.
State Rep. Rick Geist, R-Altoona, also questioned the value of the stimulus.
"You can't spend your way on borrowed money to prosperity," said Geist, who nevertheless long has been a supporter of earmarks for his local district.
Bring it on
Generally, concern about the wisdom of the stimulus doesn't seem to be stopping officials from accepting the money.
"I don't have a firm position pro or con" on the stimulus, Blair County Commissioner Donna Gority said. "[But] Blair County has lots of needs, and if money is being given out by the federal government, I want to make sure" the county gets a share.
Altoona Mayor Wayne Hippo said there's "an awful lot of waste" amid the effective allocations. He favors infrastructure, police and firefighting aid but doesn't want to see help for private businesses.
He's particularly glad for a $535,000 addition to the city's Community Development Block Grant program, a category that has supplied money for infrastructure such as curbs and sidewalks, police officers' salaries and social service partnerships with private nonprofits.
Annual block grants of about $2.5 million have kept Altoona solvent over the last decade, he said.
Yet he questions the top-down stimulus restrictions.
Altoona is getting $819,000 for a homelessness prevention program but may not have enough of a homelessness problem to use it.
"It'd be nice to have more local control," Hippo said. "Frankly, it's impossible to have one-size-fits-all."
While Hippo chafes under a federal directive, Blair County Community Action Agency Executive Director Allan Robison longs for definitive word from the federal government.
He's been hearing for months the stimulus will provide additional funding for his agency's weatherization program, but he still doesn't know how much, when it will come or the guidelines for spending it.
"The easiest thing in the world is to spend money," he said. "The hard thing is to do it right."
A hundred households are on the waiting list for a program that does 150 houses a year.
"If they simply say 'double your program,' we've got to prepare," he said.
Altoona Planning Director Larry Carter is looking at the stimulus possibilities with more equanimity.
In addition to the extra CDBG funding and homelessness-prevention money, he's is getting an energy efficiency block grant of $205,000.
"I think using the money wisely is the important thing," he said. "We're not just throwing [it] at the wall."
Other thoughts
Altoona resident Darla Wilshire believes the Democratic administration is doing what it needs to do.
In response to the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover raised taxes and cut spending - and it didn't work, said Wilshire, a part-time English instructor at Penn State Altoona.
"We had to do something different," she said.
She likes the college tuition support in the package. It will help reverse the erosion of the middle class by making young people more flexible economically and capable of weathering layoffs.
It will help keep the nation from turning into opposing camps of haves and have-nots, she said.
Her main worry is that leaders won't know when things have turned around so they can back off the funding.
Beth Britz of Duncansville believes the Democrats are leading the country to disaster.
She's joined a grass-roots movement that will hold a rally April 15 at the Blair County Courthouse to protest current fiscal policies while calling for a return to conservatism.
"Our government is going in the wrong direction, fiscally and culturally," said Britz, part of the new national American Tea Party movement.
She believes current national leaders are taking advantage of the crisis to promote a "far-left agenda," while "trying to make people more dependent on big government."
The stimulus is "government fiscally run amok" and threatens to bankrupt "our children's future," she said.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.
