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My latest American Issues Project is up, titled Obama’s Wrecking Ball Policies. Here’s an excerpt:
Leave it to Joe Biden to inadvertently tell the truth about just what is going on with the Obama administration. He gave an interview with “ABC This Week”. You’ll remember that ABC is the channel that sponsored the Obamacare infomercial where opposing voices were not allowed. Anyway, in his interview, Sheriff Joe said the following:
“The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there… We misread how bad the economy was, but we are now only about 120 days into the recovery package.” So, let’s be sure about what’s being said. Sheriff Joe is saying that neither he nor Barack Obama had any clue what they were getting into economically, and they passed an almost trillion dollar spending bill that they claimed would create jobs. They then passed the omnibus bill, filled with billions of dollars in even more spending. They said that without the stimulus package, job rates would reach 8.8%, so we needed to pass it immediately. Now, the jobless rate is well above 8.8%, and at 9.5%, it’s the highest it’s been in 26 years. We’ve lost 2.5 million jobs in a short four months. Since the stimulus bill has been passed, we’ve lost 16,000 jobs a day. Our budget deficit has been quadrupled and the public debt is over $11 trillion. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell at a 5.5% annual rate in the first financial quarter. And now Joe Biden is saying that he and President Obama merely misread the economic crisis, yet they apparently still want to go ahead using the same old methods, which have done nothing but make the economy even worse.
And just what are the methods being employed?
Be sure to go and read the whole thing.
Ima Nonymous says: The great thing about following Keynesian policies is that you can’t be wrong. If the economy somehow manages to recover after a “stimulus” is passed, you can credit the government action. If it fails to recover, you can claim the stimulus was too small.
That being said, the problem with this particular stimulus was two-fold:
1) Keynesian economics starts from the assumption of near-zero deficit (or surplus) and little to no long-term debt. The fundamental situation necessary for the policy to even have a chance of working did not exist.
2) The idea of deficit spending is supposed to be limited to infrastructure projects that were not otherwise budgeted. That type of spending would necessarily create jobs. In this case, “shovel ready” meant projects that were already in the planning phase, and given the way government contracts work, also meant that they were already in the budget. The “stimulus” just shifted who would pay, which does not create jobs. Further, very little of the “stimulus” was, as you point out, actual infrastructure related, and of that, only a tiny fraction is scheduled to be spent this year.
Knott Buyinit says: Said at the time, I did, weeda been better off if’n the gubmint had just give the whole dang country a Federal tax holiday fur 2009. Talk about stimulatin’! Course no one listens to us dumb hicks from fly-over country.
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