30 billion stimulus

From The Malaysia Insider:

The government is expected to announce a stimulus package worth more than RM30 billion next month, Sin Chew Daily, the country’s leading Chinese-language newspaper reported today.

The newspaper quoted deputy finance minister Datuk Kong Cho Ha as disclosing “the minis-budget will be worth more than RM30 billion and will benefit most sectors of the economy.”

RM30 billion is just more waste. We're just trying to dig ourselves out of a hole. What happened to riding out the waves a la 1997 financial crisis style or hunkering down for a long tough recovery?

The Malaysian Insider understands that some RM5 billion of the RM7 billion stimulus package was disbursed by the Finance Ministry to individual ministries in January but much of it has been trapped by officialdom and suffocating red tape.

As a result, very few pump-priming projects identified under the stimulus package have taken off.

Wow...incompetency. Doesn't surprise me. Did the 30 billion stimulus assume the first stimulus would also get jammed up in the system? I hope so.