This was utterly predictable, and in fact, smart people predicted it. Of course, to be fair, it was Pelosi and Reid’s “stimulus,” as well. But at least it looks like it did stimulate the electorate to replace them with someone competent, though we’re stuck with Obama for another two years.
11 thoughts on “The Failure”
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Since all the trolls seem to be otherwise occupied, I’ll speak for them. It wasn’t big enough, it wasn’t spent on the right things, it did too work, and anything not covered by those statements was Bush’s fault.
Obama’s program, after all, is the biggest stimulus package, as a share of the economy, in our history. Yet it has landed with the force of a damp sponge.
The stimulus was about $500b in federal spending over 2+ years. States and local governments cut spending by a similar amount. In the context of a $15T economy, the net stimulus is a rounding error.
“States and local governments cut spending by a similar amount.”
Even if this was true, it’s a non sequitur. The post was about federal spending.
Jim, you didn’t need to write that. I already had you covered with “it wasn’t big enough.”
Don’t worry, if you can’t weigh in more quickly, I’ll have your back. And if I can’t anticipate what you’ll say (“it wasn’t big enough” was actually, truly what I had in mind for you), I’ll just default to “it was Bush’s fault,” and throw in “it’s racist” to seal the deal.
I’m covering your six, comrade!
We’re not going to get away with this, you know. We* elected these assclowns and we are going to pay for their stupidity — maybe not today, but someday, and sooner rather than later.
* Not me. I voted for Cobra Commander.
B Lewis, you seem to have forgotten the link in your link.
Sorry. There was some kind of weird Java hiccup that killed the message the first time I tried to post this, and I didn’t want to risk hitting “post” twice. The correct link: Boom Tomorrow
The stimulus was about $500b in federal spending over 2+ years. States and local governments cut spending by a similar amount. In the context of a $15T economy, the net stimulus is a rounding error.
Jim, why are you only considering government spending anyway? Private spending probably went down a lot more, in part due to the uncertainty introduced by government policy.
Here’s my take. No private group, local or state government has the responsibility of Keynesian policy. It’s too easy for the money and subsequent economic activity to leave the business or the region. The point of federal level Keynesian spending is to compensate for the slowdown in economic activity from these other sources, including local and state governments.
This is an example of your tunnel vision in economic policy. You claim that half a trillion dollars (which is only a small part of the money that the US pumped into the economy, keep in mind that the Fed put at least twice that much into real estate and bonds) is voided because other government cut back on spending. That need not be so. If the other spending were inefficient or even harmful to the US economy (yes, you can easily have government spending that has negative impact on the economy, such as paying to maintain rent-seeking, such as peanut and sugar subsidies, for example, or paying to enforce the provisions of the recent health care “reform”).
So the States probably got rid of low value spending while in theory, the Keynesian spending at the federal level would have been in infrastructure and services with high economic value. So there should have been a net gain. There wasn’t, but I think that was because the federal spending was squandered on mostly useless things like propping up the spending of California and other failing states, or building bridges to nowhere.
As some of us recall, you’ve equated in the past indiscriminate spending to Keynesian spending. In that stilted point of view, sure dropping one sort of spending for an equal amount of another always results in zero change. In addition, we now see a second layer of blindness. You only consider government spending here. Please keep in mind that at least for the near future, most of the economy is private. That means that if you’re going to do a proper Keynesian economic analysis, you not only need to consider the effectiveness of government spending, but also how to get spending to come from private sources.
And this is probably one of the more remarkable failures of the current Democrat regime in DC. They have been extraordinarily unsuccessful at encouraging business to invest or spend. It’s no surprise since the Obama administration and Congress are probably the most business hostile regime since FDR’s first two years (1933-1934). A real Keynesian approach would also consider how to enable and encourage business, not how to destroy it.
Shorter: Nuclear power plant -> Keynesian. Bringing $60 million “back to our district” by buying $55 million of Chinese highway reader-boards -> not Keynesian. Nor sane. But typical.
It’s typical Al because most of the spending has been going to Unions. They in turn are sending big chunks of money overseas because they want to equalize and unite the working people of the world. Only problem is that there is such a disparity in wages between the people of the West against those of the East and the South that we stand to lose a lot more then they ever hope to gain. I mean have you ever wondered why this enormous Stimulus bill just appeared out of nowhere? It’s because the Dem’s had the Apollo alliance and the Tides Center writing the Stimulus and the Crap and Tax bill about 4 years ago. That alliance is an organization of labor unions.
But won’t your conscience feel so much better when your standard of living is rightfully back to the levels of 1910. 😛
I mean have you ever wondered why this enormous Stimulus bill just appeared out of nowhere?
I don’t think you need conspiracy. Every sufficiently sophisticated special interest group probably has a few such things ready to go. When the ARRA bill was being formed, there was probably a need to add bulk, which these guys readily assisted with.