[Monday morning update]
How Big Government screwed up the Big Spend:
Biden said the stimulus would “literally drop kick us out of the recession.” But Grabell concludes that “the stimulus ultimately failed to do what America expected it to do — bring about a strong, sustainable recovery. The drop kick was shanked.”
And that’s about what you might expect from a White House run by brilliant theoreticians with no one around to do a reality check. Let’s contrast Team Obama with Team Reagan. The Gipper’s cabinet had Donald Regan, former CEO of Merrill Lynch; George Schultz, former president of engineering firm Bechtel; Caspar Weinberger, also of Bechtel; Malcolm Baldridge, CEO of manufacturer Scovill. And, of course, there was Reagan himself, the former two-term governor of America’s most populous state.
It’s depressing.
[Bumped]
It’s an apologetic which does not even address the real reason the economy is in the crapper. The culprit is the toxic environment created for businesses which produce jobs. Steve Wynn sums it up well.
The stimulus package failed because it was a stimulus package. Businesses don’t expand (or start up) when they get a one-time windfall – they do so when they see long-term changes in demand and/or the costs of production.
I’m sure the administration thinks the failure was one of inadequate central planning, in not giving loan guarantees to companies to build sufficient shovel factories, which would’ve allow shovel production to jump, eventually creating a sufficient inventory of shovels to supply all the new jobs in the shoveling industry.
Of course that would have to be coordinated with centralized work-glove production, along with steel-toe boot production, hard-hat production, jeans and T-shirt production, lunch-box production, and bologna sandwich production.
Now that they’re realizing what a feat of coordination it requires, they’re probably more impressed than ever by Stalin’s genius.
You can’t just take out a credit card in everyone in the country’s name and start spending like a madman expecting that will improve the economy.
The “stimulus” was completely successful from Obama’s point of view. His Democrat cronies and campaign contributors were stimulated just fine. They got billions. As for the rest of us, not so much.
The stimulus failed because the economy needed rhubarb not cheese.
So, project Apollo was about $136 billion in 2007 dollars and the Apollo Spacecraft and Saturn rockets came to about $83 billion in 2005 dollars. So, the Stimulus at $787 billion dollars would have bought us 3.6 Apollo programs if invested in NASA. That might have been just enough to get Orion and Ares IV off the ground with the current NASA spending practices.
Liquidity trap
The next 5 years are not going to be pretty…
Don’t know if this is happening for anyone else, but I got a print dialogue when I opened this link and when I refreshed (FF 9.01).
Until we stop viewing government as the focus of, well, everything, we’re going to continue to waste money in further stimuli and other things like them.
I disagree that the problem with the stimulus was that it wasn’t sold the right way or that people don’t know enough about it.
Also, Obama wanted the infrastructure projects to take place right away but as he later joked shovel ready isn’t so shovel ready.
The author made a good point about how the tax cuts were dispersed. Why anyone would think people would be more likely to spend $10 instead of $520 is beyond me. Sure people will spend that $10 on a six pack of beer but they would have spent that $520 on a new tv or computer.