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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (5459)	1/7/2010 2:29:51 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 7936

the stimulus monies were intended to mitigate some of that pain....not completely take it away. It mitigated some of it, at the expense of definitely - 1 - Increasing debt and deficits 2 - Committing states to spend money in the future, increasing their fiscal problems even more. 3 - Causing the destruction of useful property through the cash for clunker program almost definitely - 1 - Slowing the restructuring that would help the economies long term growth by bailing out incumbents 2 - Creating political uncertainty, and in some cases lowering expected return, which would cause some to wait on investment or hiring. (But this is more about planned taxes and regulation, than the bail out money, except in the indirect sense that all the extra debt puts upward pressure on future taxes. It may be irrelevant to you but its very relevant to the people who need the money. Irrelevance is not to a person, but to a point, idea, or argument. If they don't agree, you could try to use that to argue for the bailouts, with "maybe their right", or with "the bill gets support, so its the democratic thing to do", or some other argument based off that alleged fact. But all of those are besides the point. Your treating relevance as if it was the same as importance, or the same as popularity. Something can be important and popular, and still have nothing to do with the point under discussion. The point was that extra fiscal pressure is being put on the states through committing them to future spending. That's a simple fact. Its true, and whether or not unemployed people support the bailout efforts is entirely irrelevant to that point. It increases the deficits temporarily when the economy improves those deficits can be pared back. How likely is it that they really will be paid back? (Esp. the federal one, but even the states are likely not to see large sustained surpluses). Also paying it back is a cost, again not a free lunch. If you don't deliberately over pay then you can either get more construction and infrastructure maintenance for the same price, or you can get the same amount without as much debt and as much future taxes (which would slow down future growth as or after the economy recovers), or you could get the same amount and have more left over for some other government project (perhaps education, which despite doubling or more, in terms of real per student spending per generation, you always think is underfunded), or some combination of these things. Spend more than you could possibly have to for construction, and you might have less construction, less future education (or some other category if you prefer) spending, AND higher future taxes.