OK, so we have a bill that has passed both the House and the Senate, both of which are controlled by the Democrats. In both houses, they were rushed through with little debate, and in the House, it was almost entirely crafted by the Democratic leadership, without even significant input from the Blue Dogs, let alone the Republicans. It is hundreds of pages, and totals close to a trillion dollars (a mind-numbing number that may necessitate updating the old Dirksen quote) in new spending, paid for with money that the nation doesn’t have. It has many items in it that are not obviously aimed at stimulating the economy, but rather in advancing various social and political goals, but it’s hard to be sure because few have had the opportunity to even read, let alone comprehend the whole thing.
Now which is the more likely scenario?
A. It is the output of a sober, long-debated process that was totally focused on improving the American economy, carefully considering the potential unintended consequences of every item in the bill, with associated committee hearings and qualified witnesses, or
B. It is an overnight cut’n’paste concatenation of every item on pent-up Democrats’ wish lists going back to 1994, when they lost control of the Congress, because everyone wants to get a ride on the late-Christmas tree that is sure to go through via fearmongering by a popular new president.
Come on, folks. William of Ockham had just the tool for this conundrum.
I know where my money is.
It’s a shame the lapdog media have conveniently forgotten how to ask questions like this, and declined to call Obama on his numerous falsehoods and evasions during his little chat tonight.
A trillion dollars, but laser-focused with no pork. Yeah, sure, Lightworker.
If I called it “disappointing” that would imply that I actually expected any better. I didn’t. Poorly thought-out trillion dollar boondoggles giving the party in power large parts of their wish lists appear to be common phenomena these days. I just don’t see either party knocking it off anytime soon. At least when this boondoggle gets people killed it will be killing them in the “opportunity cost” kind of fashion–indirectly, which I guess is a minor improvement in some way over the last one or two…
Eh, the problem is actually that it might not be as much of a disaster as it looks like. If the economy, like a reliable old mule, staggers under the load but recovers, it may herald a few decades of 70s-style anemia.
On the other hand, perhaps the best outcome is a real right disaster, with steadily worsening private-sector unemployment, a huge no-confidence vote by financial markets, and, icing on the cake, re-awakening inflation as the bazillions pumped into the deflating fatally holed balloon by the Fed destroy the value of the dollar.
In that case the postmodernist Democrat worldview will be utterly destroyed for a generation and a half. People will spit and curse at the mere mention of their Pelosi’s name, and also, sadly, that of Mr. Obama, who may not really be one of them in his heart.
That would be fine. I don’t mind if the 20th century Democratic Party is destroyed. We need a better alternative to the Republicans anyway. Like the Whigs, I think their time has come and gone.
I know where your money is, too, Mr. Simberg..
It just got swallowed by Hope and Change.
On the other hand, perhaps the best outcome is a real right disaster […] In that case the postmodernist Democrat worldview will be utterly destroyed for a generation and a half. People will spit and curse at the mere mention of their Pelosi’s name, and also, sadly, that of Mr. Obama, who may not really be one of them in his heart.
I think it’ll be a disaster, but not with the results you expect. The Democrats and the Big Media will tell us that (a) It’s All Bush’s Fault, and (b) Think of How Much Worse It Would Have Been if the Democrats hadn’t rescued us with their wonderful “Stimulus” legislation. And by 2012 the “Stimulus” will have so expanded the number of people and organizations who depend on checks from the government to make ends meet that the Democrats will further tighten their grip on the government.
We are so screwed.
Agree with Mike G. I was remembering that many of us predicted this during the 2006 race. We knew Republican spending was leading to a recession, so let the Democrats take control (thus weeding out spending Republicans); let them make it worse (which they did); and hopefully takeover the White House with a real fiscal conservative in 2008.
It didn’t happen.
We got rid of some of the worst Republicans, but not all. In their place, we have Democrats telling us we should drive less and have a smaller carbon foot print; yet giving money to automobile makers and decrying lost jobs at RV manufacturers. At the same time, the media is still having special feelings run up their legs whenever a Democrat says anything.
I guess the Democrats felt they shouldn’t be outdone by the Republicans, and since they spent $1 trillion in the Iraq, they have to spend $1 trillion now. Which is pretty ludicrous I guess.
As for media numbness to the current Obama administration’s stupidity, I hardly find many differences from the way the media treated W’s stupidity (Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, Iraq is sponsoring the terrorists behind 9/11) and so in his first term.
It took a few months for the Democrats to put together an $800 billion spending+tax cut package, and yes, that’s pretty quick for D.C. But it took even less time for the GOP to put together the DeMint amendment, 3 trillion in tax cuts that are unlikely to stimulate the economy, but very likely to be popular with the GOP base. A carefully considered response to the crisis, or a knee-jerk response to a political opportunity? You make the call.
The fact that the ridiculous DeMint amendment won support from nearly 90% of the GOP Senate caucus is an indication of how utterly uninterested the GOP is in playing any constructive role in governing the country.
“the way the media treated W’s stupidity (Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, Iraq is sponsoring the terrorists behind 9/11)”
You need to check your stupidity vs. W’s, Godzilla. It wasn’t just Bush saying that Iraq had WMD. Several intelligence agencies around the world including Saddam’s own disinformation campaign made this “fact” a near certainty in everyones mind at the time. And, the Bush white house explicitly stated several times that they didn’t think Iraq was directly linked to 9/11. If anything it was the media’s fault for not pointing this out more vehemently. The public at large just assumed it was the case and the media pretty much let it go, if anything, to feed their own disinformation campaign on Bush.
Now, with this Stimulus the consensus as to its usefulness is not so wide spread. And, we have Obama actually, intentionally, standing in front of the nation poignantly trying to mislead everyone — just replace the word terrorism with greed. Now, I will give the media some credit in that they are making the case against the stimulus actually known and talked about. Overall, judging from the way the reporters handed him questions last night though I would say they are ultimately letting him get away with this travesty.
I can’t believe Obama could actually sit there with a straight face and say that Japan’s ‘lost decade’ wasn’t an example of doing too much stimulating, but not enough — outrageous.
Rand – President Obama met repeatedly with Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate during the crafting of this bill. So saying that the Republicans had no input is flat wrong. Their input may not have been acted on, but it was heard.
Rand – President Obama met repeatedly with Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate during the crafting of this bill.
Big whoop.
So saying that the Republicans had no input is flat wrong. Their input may not have been acted on, but it was heard.
If it didn’t get in to the bill, they had no input.
President Obama met repeatedly with Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate during the crafting of this bill.
Yes he did. And they said what they wanted in the bill. His response, “I won”. Of course, they won too, as they were all just elected, but consider their representation? Nope. So he doesn’t get their support, and is pissed.
So because y’all don’t take my advice, I have no input on this site? 😉
No, if Rand revoked your posting rights and you became a lurker, you would have no input.
So because y’all don’t take my advice, I have no input on this site?
You have no useful input, if by that you mean influence. Obama’s “meetings” with Republicans was political theater. Particularly since the bill was crafted by Pelosi.
The “useful input” that the GOP has offered (e.g. the DeMint amendment) is a return to Bush policies: permanent tax cuts aimed at the wealthiest citizens. It’s the all-purpose GOP policy, to deal with surpluses, recessions, terrorist attacks, deficits, financial crises, or whatever else happens. After the last eight years the GOP can’t be taken seriously on economics. The Bush years featured the worst rate of job growth of any post-WWII president — and the answer to the worsening unemployment he’s left behind is more of the same?!?
Rand – so your definition of “input” is “doing what I say?”
Per The Free Dictionary, I find the definition of input to be “In general discourse input is now widely used to refer to the transmission of information and opinion.”
Information and opinion was transmitted. Therefore, input was received. Listening to somebody is not the same as agreeing with somebody.
Rand – so your definition of “input” is “doing what I say?”
No, my definition of “input” is having non-zero influence on the course of events. As I said, Pelosi wrote the bill, and Obama pretended to care what the Republicans thought.
The Bush years featured the worst rate of job growth of any post-WWII president — and the answer to the worsening unemployment he’s left behind is more of the same?!?
Yes, because obviously absolutely nothing else happened during the past eight years except tax cuts for the rich.
Do you have any idea how mendacious and ignorant this comment is?
To a first approximation, Bush fiscal policy can be summed up as tax cuts that mostly benefitted the rich. The fiscal impact of the 2001 Bush tax cuts ($1.3T) was greater than the stimulus bill now under discussion, bigger than Medicare drug coverage, even bigger than the Iraq war.
Now the economic situation is totally different from 2001, and the GOP wants to expand the biggest element of Bush’s fiscal policy even further. They have no other ideas.
To a first approximation, Bush fiscal policy can be summed up as tax cuts that mostly benefitted the rich.
See, Bob, if you’re reading, this is a perfect example of the kind of lying demagoguery that I was talking about.
The tax cuts “benefited the rich” because they’re who pay most of the taxes.
The fiscal impact of the 2001 Bush tax cuts ($1.3T)
Bull. Shit.
No one knows what the fiscal impact of the tax rate cuts was, because no one knows what would have happened to economic growth in their absence. But they probably actually increased tax revenues by staving off a worse recession.
The Bush tax cuts benefitted the rich because they were supposed to. He could have cut taxes in a way that primarily helped the poor and middle class; he didn’t.
As for the “no one knows” argument, that goes both ways. No one knows what the stimulus package will cost. By improving infrastructure, education and health care it may increase economic growth enough to pay for itself. Who knows?
But back here in the real world, we actually try to put price tags on things, and Bush’s tax cuts were his most expensive policy priority (with Iraq in second place).
To a first approximation, Bush fiscal policy can be summed up as tax cuts that mostly benefitted the rich.
Hmm. Letting 150 million taxpayers keep more of their money is benefitting mostly Bill Gates, because, gee, he turns out to have the biggest tax bill, but an Obama “stimulus” bill that funnels an equal amount of money into at most a few hundred thousand hands — state employees, teachers, “green energy” entrepreneurs, et cetera — is by contrast some wonderfully egalitarian broad-based economic jumpstart.
Because, you see, if you give “tax cuts to the rich” they just buy gold and put the gold in their giant Scrooge McDuck vaults, and swim around in it from time to time. Furthermore, the $5,000 or so extra in yearly income that an upper-middle class family enjoys as a result of the eeeeevil Bush tax cuts is just chump change, meaningless fluff they’ll probably blow on cable on-demand movies and ski trips, not even worth mentioning because Bill Gates and George Soros enjoy $50,000 extra.
Whereas when you give the same amount of money to states to rescue their hideously underfunded state employee retirement systems, or give money to T. Boone Pickens to build subsidized windfarms in East Texas — why, that money quickly flows into the general economy, multiplying like crazy, spreading wealth and happiness everywhere it goes.
Jim, it amazes me you can hold these notions simultaneous in your brain without your head exploding. The Bush tax cuts gave money to the rich, and they just sat on it. But the Obama porkalooza gives money to…er, the rich, as it turns out, but rich solar power entrepreneurs and government employees, let us not forget! — who will spend it in wonderfully helpful and stimulating ways.
You don’t see the explicit logical contradiction, do you?
Carl: there’s no contradiction. Right now we need to expand the velocity of money in the economy. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to immediately spend the marginal dollar. The richer you are, the more likely you are to buy T-bills and sit on them. And encouraging consumer spending is only part of the stimulus. Actually hiring construction workers, feeding poor people, getting them health care — those things directly blunt the impact of the recession on its most vulnerable victims.
Meanwhile, the GOP wants permanent tax cuts, weighted towards the wealthiest, to address a temporary economic problem. They can’t be taken seriously.
Oy, Jim, so much wild, empirically-unfounded speculation on which to balance the looting of $3 trillion from private hands and lavishing it about on the say-so and private peccadilloes of 500-odd lawyers in Washington. You would never risk that much of your own money on a sketchy glossy prospectus from a Get Rich Quick Internet firm. You’d insist on much more firm fact-based, proven chains of cause and effect.
What makes you so careless with Federal money? Are you too poor to pay taxes, so you figure it will be someone else’s kids’ college tuition that has to be forfeited to pay the tab? Strange.
So, first of all, why do you think the problem is consumer demand, rather than, as Treasury Sec’y Geithner said today, frozen credit markets, i.e. on the supply side rather than the demand side? According to the Treasury Secretary, and the President when he’s speaking out the right side of his mouth, the main problem is that people with capital — those evil rich again! — are unwilling to lend it just now. How is putting $500 into the hands of every homeowner upside down on his mortgage going to help him refinance at a better rate, or find a buyer to at least limit his losses?
Secondly, what makes you say all spending by poor people is more worthwhile than all spending (or savings) by rich people? Suppose poor person A spends his $500 rebate on porn and booze, while rich person B uses it to pay the first week’s salary on a new part-time employee at his dry-cleaning store? Which is more useful?
Furthermore, clearly the economic malaise is not uniformly spread over all sectors of the economy. Housing and construction are in terrible shape, with unemployment rates of 18% or worse, while education is in great shape, with unemployment rates of 3%, boom times. So doesn’t it matter where those dollars are spent? You want to draw a distinction between giving dollars to rich versus poor. Maybe it would be more useful to draw a distinction between giving money to people in this sector versus that? Maybe giving $500 to a plumber who made $180,000 last year installing showers in Los Angeles, but who is utterly out of work this year, so that he can pay to relocate to Texas, where they’re still building, or to take some licensing test so he can install sprinkler systems, whatever, is more useful than giving $500 to the University of California system so they don’t have to lay off the new diversity officer they hired because the President likes the size of her tits.
In short, your distinction is so crude as to be essentially useless. You have no idea whether this distinction, which determines where you subtract money from the economy (via taxes) and where you add it (via “stimulus”) is the right one, or possibly exactly the wrong one. You have a nice plausible theory, but pretty much zero hard measured evidence to back it up. And yet you want to risk almost 20% of the entire wealth of the nation on your wild guesswork. As I said, this is a gamble you wouldn’t dream of taking in your private life. It’s nuts that you would want to take it as a nation.
Actually hiring construction workers, feeding poor people, getting them health care — those things directly blunt the impact of the recession on its most vulnerable victims.
How would you know? More airy grand theorizing, in the absence of even the smallest bit of confirming hard data. Take it one at a time: how do you know hiring a construction worker is going to be good for him in the long run? Maybe the macroeconomic problem is there are too many construction workers in the entire nation, or at least in California, and the worst of them need to move to other places, or go into other professions. Hiring them to do goverment make-work just delays (and makes more expensive) the inevitable. It’s like “social promotion” in grade school. Oh! Your kid is failing algebra, so he can’t pass into 8th grade, which is wrenching. I know! Let’s force the algebra teacher to change his grade to a C, so he can pass into 8th grade. Problem solved! Er, no.
Feeding poor people. No doubt a priority in sub-Saharan Africa. But in the United States? News flash, Jim. No one starved to death in the United States last year. Nobody. Zip. Nada. And, nobody is going to starve to death again this year. This is no longer the 16th century, Jim. Poor people are far more likely to suffer from obesity than malnutrition. So let us stick to problems that actually exist, hmm? Let us not base our policies on Dickens’ fantasies.
Getting them health care. Same thing, Jim. Know anybody who bled to death after getting hit in the crosswalk by a car, because they had no insurance and no one was willing to treat them, poor soul? No, you don’t. Nor will you. No one fails to get health care in the United States through plain inability to pay. Zero. Many of them, to be sure, do not get the best possible health care. Many of them sit in the ER for 6 to 8 hours to have their little tyke seen for a 102 fever. Because the ER staff is overworked, and the hospital knows they won’t see a dime for laying out $2000 in costs, they may be treated roughly. But no one is going to die in the waiting room because they don’t have insurance, or money. (Or rather, to the extent someone does die, and it does happen occasionally, it’s already highly illegal and punishable by vast fines, so there’s not much more we can do about it, short of setting up a police state.)
Finally, even if we granted all your diagnoses of the really urgent needs — can you explain how this marvelous $3 trillion TARP plus stimulus package manages to avoid all three categories? Is there any money in any of them for hiring construction workers to build homes? Nope. Any money to buy food, distribute it to poor folks? Nope. How about for building free clinics in slums, subsidizing blood pressure medicine for poor old folks, subsidizing NP and physician salaries for those who work at clinics? Nope, nope, nope.
Maybe you should tell me how forking over $80 billion to bail California out of its budget hole, or $15 billion for special education teachers, or $2 billion for some experimental and presently uneconomical “green energy” hybrid status car development is going to help the poor folks, or even the carpenter or bricklayer or HVAC man who lost his job because of the housing slump. Even the proponents of the bill can’t answer that question. The best they can do is weakly argue that, er, sooner or later the money the state pours into the salaries of government workers, or teachers, is going to end up in the general economy. Wealthier teachers will want new houses, so the carpenter will, eventually, get more work. Hopefully. If everything goes according to plan…