A man after my heart:
While many have been critical of the stimulus because the it hasn’t been spent quickly enough to have the intended economic effect, Coburn urges caution. “The key point I would make is that speed isn’t near as important as accuracy,” Coburn said regarding preventing future stimulus waste. “I think we’ve had way too much speed and not enough accuracy in terms of where we’re spending the money. I understand the rush to get it out to stem the tide of the recession, but this is a five-year bill anyway.”
Finally, Coburn is adamant that the feedback from taxpayers is such that federal spending priorities need to be watched closely. “The mood in the country is ‘You’re spending money on things you don’t need. Stop it. You’re overstepping the bounds of the federal government. Stop it. You’re borrowing our children into the poorhouse. Stop it,'” he said.
Yes. Stop it.
Including health-care deform.
And it would sure be nice to get a conversation going about the proper role of the federal government.
Don’t be silly Rand. You sound like you think the government gets it’s power from the people. What an odd idea.
the proper role of the federal government
…is to expand and keep you out of their business… which is how to spend your money so they stay in power.
Had NASA gone with the “space plane” concept in the 1970s we wouldn’t be having this discussion today. The US government put too many eggs into the Space Shuttle budget and once one of them exploded the whole scheme came crashing down.
We had a choice. We could launch satellites and laboratory modules (“Skylabs”) on non-man rated boosters and visit these with a lightweight, manned space plane on a regular basis. Instead we were lured by the siren call of the mad bean counters who claimed they could make launches as cheap as $100/lb and turnaround the orbiter every 2-3 weeks. The space shuttle proved the truth of the old saw, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee”. We wasted hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make and keep that turkey flying and we really don’t have anything to show for it. Certainly not “cost savings” or “efficiency”.
Constellation is billed as a return to NASA’s roots but I doubt that. The Saturn series were the idea heavy lift boosters and only need to be updated for modern technology to resume flying manned missions. We don’t need a bigger crew capsule; we can assemble Moon Landers in orbit and shuttle up to them in Soyuz-sized modules. I’d settle for a Gemini if it meant reviving the space program.
Coburn said regarding preventing future stimulus waste
This is nonsense. If you don’t believe in Keynesian stimulus theory, then your goal should be preventing future stimulus spending, whether it’s wasteful or not. If you do believe in Keynesian stimulus theory, there is no such thing as stimulus waste; click my name for the full explanation.
Coburn’s desire to be for something that most citizens support — stimulus spending — while still criticizing Obama, leaves him in an intellectual no-man’s land.
Well, one can interpret Coburn’s comment two ways, one of which is as you have done.
Another is that stimulus is waste — which one who doesn’t believe in Keynesian idiocy would find redundant but perhaps necessary to say when the people running the executive branch are, apparently, idiots.
This is nonsense. If you don’t believe in Keynesian stimulus theory, then your goal should be preventing future stimulus spending, whether it’s wasteful or not. If you do believe in Keynesian stimulus theory, there is no such thing as stimulus waste; click my name for the full explanation.
That has to be one of the stupidest things you’ve ever said and your linked story is unreadable in its idiocy. It appears to me that the author thinks that 1) recession is the worst possible thing that can happen, and 2) enough government spending on anything no matter how stupid or short sighted will be enough to prevent a recession from happening.
My rebuttal is simple. Recession is when the unproductive jobs and businesses get culled. Call it a “stress test” that works. Second, enough government spending and you get higher inflation which will dilute more not just the government spending but every investment valued in the Dollar. If the government spending is on utterly pointless things, then you end up in the situation where you’re destroying the Dollar while at the same time not creating anything of value to partly compensate for that destruction.
Recession is when the unproductive jobs and businesses get culled.
This was the Andrew Mellon line in the Great Depression. He was Treasury Secretary when the crash hit, and his prescription was: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” A recession, he wrote, “will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
So drink a toast to all those people out of work!