This could be a little awkward. Former Rep. Pat Toomey, the leading Republican candidate for Senate, is ripping the Obama administration's economic stimulus policies this morning in a pre-buttal press conference at Computer Aid, a business in Allentown.
It's a good move to get the GOP message out there, as Obama is coming to the Lehigh Valley tomorrow to talk about the economy. But...The Philadelphia Tribune newspaper reports that the firm participated last month in a conference for minority and women-owned businesses to, among other things, get deets on how to take advantage of federal broadband-Internet stimulus funds.
To be sure, the government's website tracking stimulus dollars, www.recovery.org, does not indicate Computer Aid got any money from the feds. Still....
How is this awkward, if they didn't get any stimulus money? Even if they did, that wouldn't make criticising the stimulus necessarily hypocritical. E.g., there was and still is legitimate criticism that the stimulus wasn't focused or targeted enough, that not enough of it was going to be spent in the first year (25% or less, I think), and that too much of it was used by state and local governments to pay existing debts, not for new projects. I share those criticism, but if my wife's small business in Northern Liberties could get some of that money and in so doing could hire another employee, so be it. The criticisms are still valid, even though I and my wife would have benefitted from the stimulus. Our taking stimulus money wouldn't make us hypocrits, nor would taking the money be inconsistent with the criticisms.— pj katauskas
