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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KonKilo who wrote (103311)	2/6/2009 1:50:12 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 542139

And the intervention in Iraq was not guaranteed to improve things either, but we still went in. And you think we shouldn't have right? I might not totally agree, but I don't think the idea that "we don't know this is going to help, or even that it won't hurt, so maybe we shouldn't do this", is generally a reasonable argument. If you applied it to Iraq at the time, it wouldn't have been unreasonable. Neither is applying it to the stimulus. but I'd rather see them attempt an educated-guess effort than do nothing. You appear to be making the assumption, that this "educated guess" is a greater than 50% chance thing. I don't. Its not a very educated guess, there are no controlled experiments in macro-economics, and there are few similar situations (and none that is highly similar, or have had almost identical stimulus responses put in to effect). There are all sorts of sophisticated models, about the situation, but they don't all point in the same direction, and also while they are very sophisticated, the complexity isn't matched by an underlying understanding of exactly what's going on, why, and how we can make things better. We basically have "my model says this will work, and who knows it just might", as the basis for spending a trillion dollars. If we didn't know that the stimulus would help, but we knew it wouldn't hurt, then maybe the spending would make sense, but we don't even know it won't hurt. And we probably won't know even after the fact, because we don't know exactly what will happen without the stimulus.