micatala wrote:The stimulus is not phony, it's working, despite your continued protestations to thee contrary.
That's a good one.
Only 6% of Americans agree with you.
The Preposterous Stimulus Bill
By Andrew Cline on 2.18.10 @ 6:08AM American Spectator
Only 6 percent of Americans believe the stimulus bill passed a year ago this week has created jobs, a CBS News/New York Times poll reported last week. Six percent. Nearly six times as many Americans believe in ghosts as believe President Obama's jobs claims. It isn't hard to see why. All you have to do is go to the government's own website,
www.recovery.gov, and look at the numbers. The site reports 1.2 million jobs funded by the stimulus bill by the end of 2009. Note the terminology. That's jobs funded, not created. The administration switched from jobs "created or saved" to jobs "funded" for accuracy's sake. Or maybe to stop the mockery. Either way, it's a telling methodology.
President Obama would have us believe that the stimulus is working because the government spent a bunch of money, and that money funded 1.2 million jobs. And he has the nerve to complain that dividing the number of jobs funded into the amount spent to come up with a price per job is simplistic.
If creating jobs were that easy, the government could simply tax the country into endless prosperity. But the money has to come from somewhere. For the stimulus bill, it was borrowed. That borrowing, combined with the rest of the massive government debt-taking in the past year, has left less money available for investors. Which means fewer jobs funded by the private sector than otherwise would have been.
The question is not: How many jobs were funded by the stimulus bill? The question is: How many jobs would have been funded if that same money had been put to other uses? The American people seem to think, not unreasonably, that more jobs would have been created without the stimulus bill than with it.
They also seem to understand that there is a big difference between a permanent private-sector job and a temporary stimulus job. Recovery.gov reports that of the 634,000 stimulus jobs funded from Feb. 17 to Oct. 1, 2009, 601,000 were funded by grants. The largest grant recipient was the Governor's Office of Planning and Research in Sacramento, Calif. The second-largest was the Executive Office of the State of Washington. The third largest was "New York, State of." Go down the list. They're almost all state offices.
The bulk of the stimulus money was given to governors to spend on shoring up their state budgets. That money went primarily to employ government workers. A small fraction went to vendors.
The fraction of stimulus funds that were contracts, not grants, and went to "shovel-ready" projects went, of course, to short-term construction projects. When those projects are done, those jobs will cease to exist. The same can be said for many of the government jobs funded this past year. Many school districts, for instance, have already burned through their stimulus money. A lot of teachers will get pink slips this spring.
Much of the stimulus amounted to a "cash for clunkers" for jobs. "Cash for clunkers" basically moved car purchases from the future to last summer, meaning it delayed many auto industry layoffs. The stimulus bill moved the date of a lot of other layoffs. Instead of coming last year, they'll come this year.
So even though the Obama administration can point to specific jobs and say they were funded by the stimulus spending, it cannot say the jobs are permanent, or that the stimulus was the most effective way to create the largest number of jobs.
If the American people don't believe the stimulus bill created jobs, it's not just because of the inflated numbers in early reports of jobs "created or saved" last year.
It's because the very idea of politicians creating lasting economic strength by borrowing $787 billion and doling it out to other politicians is simply preposterous. Even more preposterous than ghosts.
Now, I am not saying we should borrow money just because it is cheap, but given the trade-off with what would happen without the spending we are doing now, it is pretty much a no-brainer.
Sorry, it hasn't worked for Greece or CA.
I fail to see how disagreeing with the facts is a very productive policy making tactic.
I'm disagreeing with your interpretation of the facts.
Fair enough. He could blame previous dems too. Still, I find it entirely appropriate for him to point out that he is dealing with problems not of his making, whether those were the fault of Bush or not. The Reps want to lay the problems at Obama's feet when they are not his fault, and they are largely completely avoiding taking any responsibility for their actions or Bush's.
With all Obama's whining you'd think he was the first president to inherit problems. Lincoln inherited problems.
Sure, we want to avoid a debt crisis. We also want to solve the numerous other problems we have.
The government's track record at solving problems is less than steller. See the War on Poverty, Afganistan, education, expanding home ownership, etc.
I will accept that Salazar may have erred in approving the rig. In that case, there is shared responsibility. I note he was in the process of trying to rectify some of the long-standing problems with MMS.
We need to judge politicians by their results, not their intentions.
We can hope.
So far I am not too encouraged. I have not heard too much about nuclear power out of Obama. I also note Reid is hammering Angle on her support for Yucca mountain. Now, Angle has major, major problems in my view, but Reid is essentially just playing to the crowd here to save his job. He is playing into the existing anti-nuke and NIMBY sentiments that are also not really based on a sound factual footing. An objective comparison of the risks of Yucca Mountain with your average above-ground coal-fired plant would probably find YM is way safer than the coal plant.
Actually, I do seem to remember Obama saying something positive about nuclear energy.
Neither do I, but you miss the point. Bush and Cheney were giving away the store to their pals. This had precious little to do with basing a policy on sound knowledge.
Cite? Obama is certainly giving away the store to his union pals, which is where much of the 'stimulous' money went.
Again, this is not what I said. I said the continued criticism of the stimulus based on the 8% number is bogus. If you want to say Obama's administration erred in making the projection that 8% is where it would top out, that is fair, but the problem is that was a very widely held view. As I said, most economists under-projected the nature and extent of the job loss problem.
OK, but that's like saying Bush gets a pass on Iraq as he didn't know how it would come out and most on both sides supported going in.
A tax credit to favored groups is not a tax rate cut. The college students and middle income families cited in your article aren't the ones who create jobs.
As noted above, most main-stream economists disagree with you.
Not really. Ask 5 economists a question and you'll get 6 different answers.
I agree increased taxes and regulation can inhibit business, but as far as tax increases, Obama's main proposal is simply going back to a 39% from a 36% upper tax bracket for those making over 250K. I don't think you will find too many main stream economists who would describe this type of change as a job killere.
Many economists think raising taxes in a bad economy is insane. Even some congressional Democrats are leery of this.
The biggest problem with tax cuts bring more revenue arguments is they typically do not take into account any other variables. Even in the Reagan era, it is unclear how much additional revenues were due to tax cuts and how much were due to other factors (like growing population, growth in Per Capita GDP and productivity, etc.).
Growth in GDP and productivity were a result of Reagan's tax cuts.
How can you equate a "party" with maybe a couple of dozen members and a Tea Party which can actually draw hundreds or even thousands to at least some of its events?
Also, the allegations on the dropped case are being made by one guy who evidently has a big axe to grind and is not exactly an objective observer.
Are you claiming partisans at a polling place carrying a baseball bat isn't voter intimidation?
FOX clearly blew that story way, way, way, way out of proportion.
Your opinion. What was blown way out of proportion is the liberal media's attempt to label the Tea Party as racist.
Republicans are the ones who made it partisan. The filibuster use clearly documents they have been completely unintersted in being a productive minority party.
Let me guess, 'productive' means being a rubber stamp for the unpopular Obama agenda? 75% of Americans want government to be smaller or grow no larger.
You continue to dodge and digress.
No, you are dodging my question of how Afganistan is goin, which you claim to be some kind of Obama achievement.
Are you for or against cutting all spending for the Afhan war or not? I brought this up as a possible place to cut the deficit. You want to reduce the deficit. Yea or nay on spending for the Afghan war?
IMHO, we should be getting out of there.
More dodging.
Another dodge of my question of how Obama's economic plan is going. Normally the more severe the recession the more dramatic the recovery. That isn't happening.
These are not bad things to want. The problem is that people who are real leaders or who want to be understand that solutions are not always easy and choices involve trade-offs. The Tea Party does not seem to understand this, nor do Republicans in congress, and especially Tea Party sympathizers like Michelle Bachmann.
We will see this November who is really in touch with reality.
"We are fooling ourselves if we imagine that we can ever make the authentic Gospel popular......it is too simple in an age of rationalism; too narrow in an age of pluralism; too humiliating in an age of self-confidence; too demanding in an age of permissiveness; and too unpatriotic in an age of blind nationalism." Rev. John R.W. Stott, CBE
Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.
