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

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (624019)	8/11/2011 9:20:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578562

Everyone is driven by beliefs. Its impossible, probably even undesirable (if it was possible) not to be. Ideally those beliefs should be subject to revision when faced with sufficient argument and evidence, but they are still beliefs, and if you change your mind then you have a new belief not no belief. Non-partisan doesn't mean much. It just means your not affiliated with a political party. The controversy here is largely about the effect of government spending on demand and then more generally on the economy. The whole issue can (at least for the short run, there are other longer term issues) be boiled down to what the multiplier is when the government spends money on stimulus efforts. The CBO assumes its greater than 1. That's not an assumption that's far out in left field, a lot of economists agree, most particularly the keynesians. But because they assume that their conclusions are going to show that. It would be the same if they made assumptions less positive about stimulus except obviously the conclusions would be different. Either way you can't use the result of the equations as if it settled the issue, to set up the equations in the first place the CBO has to make assumptions about the results. The equations can tell you that given assumptions X and Y, we get result Z, but they don't tell us whether the assumptions where correct.