Biden Says “Spending As Fast As We Can”" Germany Joins List Cautioning U. S.

Vice President Biden said Tuesday “There’s been some criticism that we’ve not gotten enough money out so far. Well look, since I’m the guy who was put in charge of it, I want to make sure in the first 100 days we do it right.” No one pointed out to the lugubrious VP that those “first 100-days” are long since past.

Biden made the comments at a hearing with small business owners, many of whom said they’d secured credit from banks and had been able to hire new employees as a result of the stimulus funding during the Bush-Paulson period.

Biden pointed to other ways the plan had begun helping to restore the weak economy, including an $8,000 tax credit offered to new home buyers.

He said spending on infrastructure projects like roads and bridges would speed up in the coming months. But he warned that the key to maintaining public trust in the program was accounting for how the money has been spent. The VP did not explain how such onetime project would add permanent jobs while the nation lost 600,000 more jobs last month.

Obama signed the massive, $787 billion stimulus plan into law in February and tapped Biden to oversee its implementation and his handling is being harshly criticized as disorganized, political and snail-like. A core tenet of the program was to spend the money quickly to jolt the economy and put millions of people back to work.  But, that hasn’t happened.

With so much money at stake, Biden said some waste was inevitable and that a team of federal auditors had already uncovered problematic projects. “People are being scammed already,” Biden said, promising to expose abuses whenever they were detected.

At the same time, Biden made clear that the stimulus money was not intended to solve every problem facing state and local government and that the huge spike in federal assistance was not going to continue indefinitely.

Pressed by a local county legislator on whether the federal government would increase funding to help ensure wastewater quality, Biden said flatly, “It won’t happen.”

He acknowledged, “Communities are saying, ‘Hey Joe, we don’t want you going away.’ What everyone has to understand is we are not making a fundamental shift in responsibility to deal with local problems.”

On a cautionary note German Chancellor Angela Merkel has harsh words for central banks around the world, suggesting they have eased monetary policy too far in their effort to fight recession. She says current central bank policy risks bringing back the financial crisis.

“I view with great skepticism the powers of the Fed, for example, and also how, within Europe, the Bank of England has carved out its own small line,” she said in a Berlin speech cited by The Wall Street Journal.

Merkel isn’t too impressed with The European Central Bank either, saying it “has also bowed somewhat to international pressure with the purchase of covered bonds.”

She was referring to the ECB’s plan to buy 60 billion euros ($85 billion) of corporate bonds.

“We must return together to an independent central-bank policy and to a policy of reason, otherwise we will be in exactly the same situation in 10 years’ time,” Merkel says.

Germand joins Russia, France and numerous others who are urging caution by the U. S. in its frantic spending scheme.