Things were worse than she thought.
Your point?
That's what you call an "excuse". And a weak one. At the very least, a rational person would question whether "things were worse than she thought" or whether she was just dead wrong about the stimulus helping the economy turn around. Given that stimulus has never, ever worked before, a stronger argument can be made that stimulus is just the wrong way to approach the problem.
Further, if this person wasn't competent to determine how bad things were, how is she competent to decide "how much" is enough?
As Milton Friedman has pointed out, any positive effect of "stimulus" is temporary, and will ultimately result in inflation. Which will come in due time, as the unemployment rate comes down (the fact that we haven't had inflation yet [from the insane money printing of the last few years] tells you just how bad the unemployment situation is).
You are, and have been, wrong about the Great Depression. Deficit spending helped, but austerity measures were instituted too soon, the unemployment rate was still above 10%.
Deficit spending during the Depression was somewhat justifiable under the concept of Keynesianism, since we weren't sitting on this ridiculous structural debt we now have. You could at least make the argument that it was in accordance with Keynes' principles. Today, the suggestion that the spending coincides with Keynesian philosophy is nonsense. The one guy out there talking about paying down the debt is under vicious assault from the Left.
>> Nonsense. It was pretty bad by the end of 2008. Long before Obama was looking likely.
Perhaps you missed it, but Obama was elected at the end of 2008. And it was apparent he would be (but for a single week, perhaps) much earlier in the year.
>> It never accelerates quickly when the collapse is financial. That is a long and slow process.
Recessions have a pattern that is pretty consistent: Sharp recessions are followed by sharp upturns. Flatter recessions tend to have flatter upturns. This recession, in which we had unprecedented wasteful government spending, was a sharp downturn with a totally flat upturn (in fact, an upturn which has not yet happened).
>> The LFPR won't recover until we do something about the long term unemployed.
Oh, but I thought economic stimulus solved those problems. Or are you now admitting that it is temporary, and cannot be thought of as a solution to a recession? (Glad to see you have moved my direction).
>> You have made that claim. But it isn't true. Management drove GM into Chapter 11.
Yeah, they screwed up by not building the Volt earlier, right?
>> Nonsense again. Tax cuts only do that if they are way too high. Which obviously wasn't the case.
Tax receipts (constant $)
2002 2.029
2003 1.901
2004 1.950 (tax cuts into effect)
2005 2.154
2006 2.324
2007 2.414
2008 2.288 (recession starts to hit hard)
I think the results from 2005, 06, 07 pretty much disprove any argument that tax cuts do not increase revenue.
>> They have already done that. Please try to keep up.
They certainly haven't. They had it shoved down their throat by Ch. 11, but the unions would have been broken or at least shut down substantially under a plain-old Ch. 11 (Romney-styled) without Obama interference. |
