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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (563099)	4/27/2010 9:11:40 AM
From: jlallen	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572448

One tunnel project? That makes a recovery? Do you think that the road/tunnel/bridge construction sector was the only sector affected in the downturn? Unemployment remains at 9.7%. Three weeks ago a record was set in NH for the most number of jobless claims EVER filed. Wake up and smell the coffee, dipshit. The "stimulus" was and remains a dismal failure. J.

To: Alighieri who wrote (563099)	4/27/2010 11:01:22 AM
From: jlallen	1 Recommendation Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 1572448

Don't Try This Again IBD Editorials Posted 04/26/2010 06:23 PM ET Jobs: Since the Obama administration took over, Washington has passed two recovery bills costing more than $800 billion. At that price, shouldn't we be experiencing an employment boom? Taxpayers are being fleeced. Less than a month after his inauguration, President Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus bill. The promises flowed freely. In the flush of the moment, the White House said that by the end of 2010, 3.5 million jobs would be created or saved — 90% of them in the private sector — and unemployment would peak at 8%. As he signed the legislation, Obama declared that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act "does not mark the end of our economic troubles," but that it would "mark the beginning of the end — the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs." There were "shovel-ready projects" just waiting to put Americans back to work. A little more than a year later, with unemployment at nearly 10%, Congress passed a jobs bill that includes $17.5 billion in tax cuts, business credits and subsidies for state and local construction bonds. It also bumps $20 billion into the federal highway trust fund to be spent on highway and transit programs. As expected, the March 18 Rose Garden signing ceremony for the jobs bill included another round of empty promises. "We may soon be adding jobs instead of losing them," Obama said. "The jobs bill I'm signing today is intended to help accelerate this process." So how has the legislation played out in the real world? About as well as we expected, which is to say Washington is spending a lot of other people's money on initiatives that won't achieve what they were intended to. A survey of the membership of the National Association for Business Economics confirms the skepticism we had about these bills. Nearly three-fourths (73%) of the 68 respondents to the NABE April Industry Survey "reported the fiscal stimulus enacted in February 2009 has had no impact on employment to date" (emphasis ours). A similar number (68%) also believe "a jobs bill, such as the one recently enacted into law, will have no impact on payrolls" while 30% think it will provide a moderate payroll boost. Economic history tells us that government spending does not create private-sector jobs, though it does help boost public-sector employment, which does nothing to promote economic growth. A government cannot spend a country into prosperity or even out of a recession. Stimulus legislation merely redistributes wealth to the politically connected and the politically favored. Jobs, the real jobs that will move us ahead, are generated through economy-fueling private investment. Those investment dollars cannot be loosed if the government is taking them out of the capital markets through taxes — including those taxes needed to pay for useless recovery bills. Vice President Joe Biden, who is intimately familiar with political hyperbole, has said Americans were getting their money's worth from the stimulus. As we have previously noted, that's more punch line than policy analysis. Since the bill was passed, the net job loss has been 3.5 million. When compared with the number of jobs the stimulus was supposed to create, the net loss is almost 7 million. By any objective definition, that constitutes a failure. It's clear that policymakers should try something else. We, of course, suggest tax cuts that will stimulate investment. Without capital, capitalism, the only system that has ever provided economic abundance, cannot expand an economy and raise employment. If businesses are burdened to compete with government for scarce dollars, they will lose — they cannot resort to force, as government does — and those losses are felt throughout the economy. Rather than thinking tax cuts, the power in Washington is toying with the idea of implementing a value-added tax, which would suck even more dollars from the private sector and diminish the country's capital stock. The majority party should have learned from the failed 2009 stimulus what taking money out of the private sector will do, but it seems unable to reflect on even the recent past.