Obama's $1b/hour

I work some hardcore Republicans. At lunch recently, one of them said that Obama (more correctly, the Congress with a majority of Democrats) has spent $1,000,000,000 per hour. I call shenanigans!

Republicans in the Senate did the "math" like this:

(Cost of Stimulus Bill + Cost of Fiscal Year 2009 omnibus bill) / number of hours during the first 50 days of Obama's presidency = $1 billion per hour

Looks sound to me -- WAIT A MINUTE.

The omnibus bill should have been passed last year during the Bush administration, but wasn't. Basically, if Congress doesn't have their shit together by Oct 1 of the previous year, the budget for a bunch of departments of the government are lumped together in this one bill. Either way, it will be spent over the course of the year.

The stimulus bill will be paid out over several years, with most of it going out in 18 months.

So let's now figure out the real cost of the bills per hour, even though this math is pretty shady, too:

$410 billion (Omnibus bill - source) / [(365 days)(24 hrs/day) = $46.8 million/hr

$819 billion (Stimulus plan - source) / [1.5(365 days)(24 hrs/day)] = $62.3 million/hr

So, "Obama" "really" "is spending" $109 million/hr. So it was a nice try by the Senator, but he was off by a factor of 10. Anyway the whole exercise is worthless because this isn't how the government works.

The most annoying thing about this whole deal is that had Republicans won both houses and elected McCain, these bills would cost nearly as much:

Furthermore, most of this money would have probably been spent even if Republicans controlled congress and John McCain had won the White House. The omnibus had some increases in spending over recent levels, including some departments that got 10 percent increases. But no Republican has proposed not funding the government. (McCain spoke of spending freezes on the trail, not dramatic reductions.) And Republicans would still have needed to find a way to pass the omnibus in the first weeks of the new year. Something similar can be said for the stimulus. Though few Republicans supported the stimulus bill Obama signed, most did not oppose the idea of an expensive stimulus to deal with the economic collapse. Republicans broadly supported a $152 billion stimulus last year, for example, and this year they proposed a tax-cut heavy alternative that would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars. (Notably, the Republicans left out a price for their plan when it was proposed.) Though the Republican stimulus might have been smaller, and would contain more tax cuts and less spending, it still would have been expensive. In this alternate universe, however, McConnnell and his comrades would not be complaining about the pace of McCain's per-hour spending rate, trying to scare the country with big numbers that don't mean all that much.
Source

So that's great.

Sources:
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/03/11/the-math-behind-a-billion-dollars-an-hour/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_spending_bill