Just wait, they haven't opened the floodgates yet but they will soon. All this cash will come pouring out right before election time so they can hop up on their stump and shout to the masses what a great life we have. I just hope people aren't dumb enough to fall for it yet again... but who am I kidding.
Exactly what I'm talking about. Surely you are smart enough to realize if you take from peter to pay paul and give the same money back to peter no one has really made any money?
In order to understand if the stimulus has been a success, you have to define what the objective of the stimulus was. The problem in the economy started in housing where a bubble in prices and supply had formed. When housing bubble could not sustain itself anymore, it burst, which shutdown home building and real estate sales, mortgage lending activity. That backed into the financial industry meltdown which was based on the fraudulent idea that bundles of subprime mortgages were safe investments. The implosion of housing and banking was quite loud and scared crap out of everyone. The stock market crashed. Business got bad for everyone, and in particular the car companies, and GM and Chrysler both declared bankruptcy. That affected thousands of jobs all across the country. Nobody was spending, our national savings rate went from (negative) to plus 6% in a year. We were in a down spiral driven by fear. IMO, the purpose of the stimulus was to halt the down spiral. It gave a psychological lift to the economy (folks said "hey, somebody is going to do something"), which was reflected in a recovery in the stock market. The great fear was broken, some folks resumed spending. If you think the objective of the stimulus was to halt the down spiral, it worked. Greenspan said the stimulus took "collapse off the table". If you think the objective of the stimulus was to fix all the problems in the economy, restore robust growth, and make everything ok overnight (or in a year), then I think your expectations were unrealistic. To ultimately work, the stimulus has to be of sufficient size and duration to artificially keep the economy going until the real economy recovers and can sustain the nation again. Sometimes that happens on the first try, sometimes it does not. With the mild recession in 2001, Bush cut taxes in 2001, and it really did not help. Bush cut taxes again in 2003, plus Greenspan dropped rates to 1% in 2003 and 2004 and a recovery finally occurred, but the artificially low rates contributed to the housing bubble by enabling those ridiculously low teaser rates on the ARMs.
Since none of the "experts" or politicians seem to have the answer and just "try" a plan to see if it works, I would like to try one of my own. I believe Barney Frank had a huge hand in the housing collapse. He's good at plugging holes :grin: so let's use him to cap the oil well which would solve two problems at once. The oil would stop flowing and the garbage politics from Barney would stop spewing which would raise confidence and help the economy. :thumb: Meanwhile Barry just sits back because he has no clue what to do. If only the magical teleprompters had the answers.
Surely you are smart enough to realize that the scenario you describe is phony because that the stimulus was never intended to create money. It was intended to keep the economy moving because people and corporations were not spending much for fear of the future, a situation that only makes the economy slow down even more, creating a downward spiral that leads to a depression. A stimulus is intended to break that spiral by spending money on projects that put money into contractors payrolls, allowing contractors to retain and hire employees who get paychecks, enabling employees to pay for housing, buy food, and even HD TV's, enabling businesses to not go broke, enabling stock prices and dividends to rise, creating consumer and corporate confidence to spend, hire, and be innovative, . . . and thus preventing a depression and enabling the ongoing GDP growth and economic recovery, which is undeniable. Admit that your objections are based on your knee-jerk, anti-democrat political ideology, amigo. :grin:
Meanwhile... New claims for jobless benefits rise sharply - Yahoo! News At least they didn't use the word "Unexpectedly"...
On Yahoo's main page list of news items, the link to that story sure did. I had a good laugh about it. If it's always "unexpected", what idiots are doing the "expecting"? :grin: New claims for jobless benefits jumps unexpectedly
