No one who was really paying attention should be shocked.
Thieves.
11 thoughts on “The Failure Of The Stimulus”
but but Rand…. it stopped the increasing trend of more job layoffs… we… we… we are stabilized now. SEE!!! it worked. And no, that upward trend in April is just a blip…
Come on, Rand, everyone knows that the recession is over and we are doing really well. If GWB hadn’t blown up the BP oil rig, the unemployment rate would be almost zero. Also, all we need to do is add 5-8 million government jobs and we’d have that pesky unemployment report looking just dandy-fine.
We have a plan to put everybody to work. First you will be educated in our camp…pus. We will give you these neat free T-shirts and free lunch. Then there will be zero unemployment. It’s all part of the plan. It’s all voluntary and you must comply.
Trust us.
When it comes to evaluating how well the stimulus package is working to reduce unemployment, keep in mind that anything is possible if you lower your standards far enough.
Is anyone surprised? ANYONE? You can’t be a monarch without serfs. Don’t have any? Then make them. This is exactly what they wanted. Let’s see if the November elections are allowed to happen.
The federal stimulus just barely made up for the state and local anti-stimulus. We haven’t had a big net increase in government spending, so it’s no surprise that we’ve had little net stimulus.
Tsk. To understand the logical here, it’s only necessary to remember the ironclad logic by which medieval minds tested whether a person was a witch or not: throw her in the water. If she drowns, she was innocent. If she does not, she’s a witch and needs burning. In neither case are there any subsequent complaints about a miscarriage of justice.
See, if socialism works, then that proves sociaism works. If it seems to fail, that means either you do not understand what it was supposed to achieve, or else not enough effort was put into it — it wasn’t real socialism.
Same here. If you think the stimulus failed, it’s either because you don’t understand what the stimulus was trying to achieve, or there wasn’t enough stimulus.
Nonsense. All educated people know that the Stimulus created or saved several million jobs. Think how much worse the unemployment numbers would be if we hadn’t spent $220,000,000,000 on million dollar doors and $500,000 hamhocks in the seventy-sixth congressional district of New Hampshire! What people like Rand don’t realize is that the only cure for debt and poverty is to spend more money.
[/Jim]
Perish the thought that we might actually try to stimulate the economy by letting productive people keep a little more of what they produce; we tried that in the 20s, the 60s and the 80s and we all remember what economic nightmares those decades were. Oh, wait…
Bush was half right and Obama is completely wrong.
The federal stimulus just barely made up for the state and local anti-stimulus. We haven’t had a big net increase in government spending, so it’s no surprise that we’ve had little net stimulus.
Try looking at actual GDP statistics. These figures are in “chained dollars” which automatically adjusts for inflation. Federal contribution to GDP increased by more than 10%. State/local contribution over the past two years declined by somewhere between 1-2%. Collectively, that meant a bit over 3% increase in GDP contribution from all government spending. This meager increase in government contribution is particularly interesting considering that total government spending increased by more than 10% over the past two years. With the decline in revenue, that means government should be generating a lot more GDP than it actually is, especially if your model (like those of Obama administration economists) uses considerable economic multipliers for government spending.
Thus, we have yet another bit of evidence that government spending of the past couple of years has not helped the US economy.
As an aside, the Romer and Bernstein paper (the 2009 paper which summarized the Obama administration’s economic rationalization for the ARRA) claims a 1.05 immediate multiplier effect for government spending, increasing to roughly 1.5 multiplier after 5 quarters (5/4 of a year, that is). Similarly, tax cuts start at a 0.5 multiplier and increase to 1 multiplier after 8 quarters (two years).
We see since 2008, a 570 billion dollar increase in total government spending (it may actually be much greater than that due to federal government acquisition of bad assets) and a 300 billion dollar decline in tax revenue over two years. That should result in roughly a minimum of 750 billion dollars of GDP increase even if these changes occurred all in the last quarter. That’s a bit over 5% of GDP in current dollars. Given that most of the spending increase and revenue drops occur more than a few quarters ago and that we’re speaking of a two year period of Keynesian huffing and puffing, that means actual GDP contribution from government spending and reduced tax collection should be well over a trillion current dollars, yielding a GDP boost in excess of 7%.
If the Romer/Bernstein paper was estimating the multiplier effect on chained dollars GDP, the effect should be even more pronounced. If there’s interest, I’ll attempt to estimate these effects properly with a spreadsheet.
but but Rand…. it stopped the increasing trend of more job layoffs… we… we… we are stabilized now. SEE!!! it worked. And no, that upward trend in April is just a blip…
Come on, Rand, everyone knows that the recession is over and we are doing really well. If GWB hadn’t blown up the BP oil rig, the unemployment rate would be almost zero. Also, all we need to do is add 5-8 million government jobs and we’d have that pesky unemployment report looking just dandy-fine.
We have a plan to put everybody to work. First you will be educated in our camp…pus. We will give you these neat free T-shirts and free lunch. Then there will be zero unemployment. It’s all part of the plan. It’s all voluntary and you must comply.
Trust us.
When it comes to evaluating how well the stimulus package is working to reduce unemployment, keep in mind that anything is possible if you lower your standards far enough.
Is anyone surprised? ANYONE? You can’t be a monarch without serfs. Don’t have any? Then make them. This is exactly what they wanted. Let’s see if the November elections are allowed to happen.
The federal stimulus just barely made up for the state and local anti-stimulus. We haven’t had a big net increase in government spending, so it’s no surprise that we’ve had little net stimulus.
Tsk. To understand the logical here, it’s only necessary to remember the ironclad logic by which medieval minds tested whether a person was a witch or not: throw her in the water. If she drowns, she was innocent. If she does not, she’s a witch and needs burning. In neither case are there any subsequent complaints about a miscarriage of justice.
See, if socialism works, then that proves sociaism works. If it seems to fail, that means either you do not understand what it was supposed to achieve, or else not enough effort was put into it — it wasn’t real socialism.
Same here. If you think the stimulus failed, it’s either because you don’t understand what the stimulus was trying to achieve, or there wasn’t enough stimulus.
Nonsense. All educated people know that the Stimulus created or saved several million jobs. Think how much worse the unemployment numbers would be if we hadn’t spent $220,000,000,000 on million dollar doors and $500,000 hamhocks in the seventy-sixth congressional district of New Hampshire! What people like Rand don’t realize is that the only cure for debt and poverty is to spend more money.
[/Jim]
Perish the thought that we might actually try to stimulate the economy by letting productive people keep a little more of what they produce; we tried that in the 20s, the 60s and the 80s and we all remember what economic nightmares those decades were. Oh, wait…
Bush was half right and Obama is completely wrong.
The federal stimulus just barely made up for the state and local anti-stimulus. We haven’t had a big net increase in government spending, so it’s no surprise that we’ve had little net stimulus.
Try looking at actual GDP statistics. These figures are in “chained dollars” which automatically adjusts for inflation. Federal contribution to GDP increased by more than 10%. State/local contribution over the past two years declined by somewhere between 1-2%. Collectively, that meant a bit over 3% increase in GDP contribution from all government spending. This meager increase in government contribution is particularly interesting considering that total government spending increased by more than 10% over the past two years. With the decline in revenue, that means government should be generating a lot more GDP than it actually is, especially if your model (like those of Obama administration economists) uses considerable economic multipliers for government spending.
Thus, we have yet another bit of evidence that government spending of the past couple of years has not helped the US economy.
As an aside, the Romer and Bernstein paper (the 2009 paper which summarized the Obama administration’s economic rationalization for the ARRA) claims a 1.05 immediate multiplier effect for government spending, increasing to roughly 1.5 multiplier after 5 quarters (5/4 of a year, that is). Similarly, tax cuts start at a 0.5 multiplier and increase to 1 multiplier after 8 quarters (two years).
We see since 2008, a 570 billion dollar increase in total government spending (it may actually be much greater than that due to federal government acquisition of bad assets) and a 300 billion dollar decline in tax revenue over two years. That should result in roughly a minimum of 750 billion dollars of GDP increase even if these changes occurred all in the last quarter. That’s a bit over 5% of GDP in current dollars. Given that most of the spending increase and revenue drops occur more than a few quarters ago and that we’re speaking of a two year period of Keynesian huffing and puffing, that means actual GDP contribution from government spending and reduced tax collection should be well over a trillion current dollars, yielding a GDP boost in excess of 7%.
If the Romer/Bernstein paper was estimating the multiplier effect on chained dollars GDP, the effect should be even more pronounced. If there’s interest, I’ll attempt to estimate these effects properly with a spreadsheet.