"You didn't get there on your own"

[Zander]

You know, it is really funny (not really)...NONE of you right wingers with tiny little brains and big mouths EVER opened your pie holes when Republicans ran up most of our debt. Not a fucking PEEP.

Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times. George W. Bush raised it 7 times. WHERE was the angst?

Did Bush include his 2 wars in his budgets?...NO, WHY NOT? Oh, that's right, the war was going to pay for itself.

If you can't read and comprehend THIS chart, then even the short bus is not for you...

Under Obama, federal spending (which has grown every year since then 1960s) is increasing at its slowest pace in half a century, and federal employment is in true decline. Eighteen months removed from the start of the Census, it's shrinking at its fastest rate since the mid-1950s.

So what were are left with is denial of the facts, because of your hatred for our President, and the dogma driven right wing pea sized brains you were born with.

Get your head out of Obama's ass and face reality. Obama is a failure. He had a huge majority in the House and Senate for 2 years. He had a bad economy to deal with. So what did he do? He decided to spend his entire first 2 years on ramming a hugely unpopular entitlement program, "Obamacare", down our throats- and totally ignored the economy. He was rewarded with a massive defeat in 2010 - he is facing a second rebuke in 2012. He's a failure.

I don't have my head up anybody's ass. There are things I don't like about Obama. But, the Affordable Healthcare Act is hugely popular when each provisions is polled. The only provision that is not popular is the individual mandate. Which is a Republican idea. Obama, who you folks call a 'socialist', shut out the progressive and liberals during the health care debate. We should have had a public option, or the ability to buy Medicare before you are 65. Obama didn't have the 60 votes needed, because the Senator from Aetna, Joe LIEberman and blue dog Democrats.

The Stimulus Bill was a big success, it was just not big enough. But it did reverse the hemorrhaging of jobs that Bush left him with.

Do you people stand on your head when you read these charts?

Bush handed Obama the worst economy since the great depression. Obama immediately passed a job-stimulus bill which helped stop job losses faster than during the milder 1st Bush recession.

December 9, 2011. The economy was collapsing at its fastest rate since the Great Depression when Obama took office. In his second month he got Congress to pass a jobs stimulus bill worth about $900 billion. This helped stop the collapse and heightened the first spike in job growth. But the Republicans blocked more stimulus and by August 2010, falling stimulus spending began reducing job growth.

Thanks, Mr Krugman. If only Obama had put us deeper in debt, then we'd be all be better off!! yeah, that's the ticket.

Face it bub, Obama is going to be sent home, permanently. He had a chance to be a great leader, he wasted his chance passing a law that will be gutted the moment Romney is sworn in.

 

[Full-Auto]

You know, it is really funny (not really)...NONE of you right wingers with tiny little brains and big mouths EVER opened your pie holes when Republicans ran up most of our debt. Not a fucking PEEP.

Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times. George W. Bush raised it 7 times. WHERE was the angst?

Did Bush include his 2 wars in his budgets?...NO, WHY NOT? Oh, that's right, the war was going to pay for itself.

If you can't read and comprehend THIS chart, then even the short bus is not for you...

Under Obama, federal spending (which has grown every year since then 1960s) is increasing at its slowest pace in half a century, and federal employment is in true decline. Eighteen months removed from the start of the Census, it's shrinking at its fastest rate since the mid-1950s.

So what were are left with is denial of the facts, because of your hatred for our President, and the dogma driven right wing pea sized brains you were born with.

Get your head out of Obama's ass and face reality. Obama is a failure. He had a huge majority in the House and Senate for 2 years. He had a bad economy to deal with. So what did he do? He decided to spend his entire first 2 years on ramming a hugely unpopular entitlement program, "Obamacare", down our throats- and totally ignored the economy. He was rewarded with a massive defeat in 2010 - he is facing a second rebuke in 2012. He's a failure.

I don't have my head up anybody's ass. There are things I don't like about Obama. But, the Affordable Healthcare Act is hugely popular when each provisions is polled. The only provision that is not popular is the individual mandate. Which is a Republican idea. Obama, who you folks call a 'socialist', shut out the progressive and liberals during the health care debate. We should have had a public option, or the ability to buy Medicare before you are 65. Obama didn't have the 60 votes needed, because the Senator from Aetna, Joe LIEberman and blue dog Democrats.

The Stimulus Bill was a big success, it was just not big enough. But it did reverse the hemorrhaging of jobs that Bush left him with.

Do you people stand on your head when you read these charts?

Bush handed Obama the worst economy since the great depression. Obama immediately passed a job-stimulus bill which helped stop job losses faster than during the milder 1st Bush recession.

December 9, 2011. The economy was collapsing at its fastest rate since the Great Depression when Obama took office. In his second month he got Congress to pass a jobs stimulus bill worth about $900 billion. This helped stop the collapse and heightened the first spike in job growth. But the Republicans blocked more stimulus and by August 2010, falling stimulus spending began reducing job growth.

The stimulus was a success?



Well if we are talking outsourcing.....it was huge...............

 

[Listening]

You know, it is really funny (not really)...NONE of you right wingers with tiny little brains and big mouths EVER opened your pie holes when Republicans ran up most of our debt. Not a fucking PEEP.

Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times. George W. Bush raised it 7 times. WHERE was the angst?

Did Bush include his 2 wars in his budgets?...NO, WHY NOT? Oh, that's right, the war was going to pay for itself.

If you can't read and comprehend THIS chart, then even the short bus is not for you...

Under Obama, federal spending (which has grown every year since then 1960s) is increasing at its slowest pace in half a century, and federal employment is in true decline. Eighteen months removed from the start of the Census, it's shrinking at its fastest rate since the mid-1950s.

So what were are left with is denial of the facts, because of your hatred for our President, and the dogma driven right wing pea sized brains you were born with.

Ah yes,

The George Carlin analysis of people....he can read our minds.

Federal employment should decline. There is nothing to pay for it. It isn't declining fast enough !

Denial of the facts...you say "not one peep" when I heard all kinds of crowing.

Go Fluke yourself.

 

[Bfgrn]

Get your head out of Obama's ass and face reality. Obama is a failure. He had a huge majority in the House and Senate for 2 years. He had a bad economy to deal with. So what did he do? He decided to spend his entire first 2 years on ramming a hugely unpopular entitlement program, "Obamacare", down our throats- and totally ignored the economy. He was rewarded with a massive defeat in 2010 - he is facing a second rebuke in 2012. He's a failure.

I don't have my head up anybody's ass. There are things I don't like about Obama. But, the Affordable Healthcare Act is hugely popular when each provisions is polled. The only provision that is not popular is the individual mandate. Which is a Republican idea. Obama, who you folks call a 'socialist', shut out the progressive and liberals during the health care debate. We should have had a public option, or the ability to buy Medicare before you are 65. Obama didn't have the 60 votes needed, because the Senator from Aetna, Joe LIEberman and blue dog Democrats.

The Stimulus Bill was a big success, it was just not big enough. But it did reverse the hemorrhaging of jobs that Bush left him with.

Do you people stand on your head when you read these charts?

Bush handed Obama the worst economy since the great depression. Obama immediately passed a job-stimulus bill which helped stop job losses faster than during the milder 1st Bush recession.

December 9, 2011. The economy was collapsing at its fastest rate since the Great Depression when Obama took office. In his second month he got Congress to pass a jobs stimulus bill worth about $900 billion. This helped stop the collapse and heightened the first spike in job growth. But the Republicans blocked more stimulus and by August 2010, falling stimulus spending began reducing job growth.

Thanks, Mr Krugman. If only Obama had put us deeper in debt, then we'd be all be better off!! yeah, that's the ticket.

Face it bub, Obama is going to be sent home, permanently. He had a chance to be a great leader, he wasted his chance passing a law that will be gutted the moment Romney is sworn in.

I am truly amazed at the lack of understanding the right has of economics. Even this conservative icon understood. Which leads me to believe none of you are conservatives. You are some mutant form of life.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
Edmund Burke

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
Edmund Burke


Stimulus Too Small - The Wall Street Journal

Fourteen months ago, just after Barack Hussein Obama's election, most of us would have bet that the U.S. unemployment rate today would be something like 7.5%, that it would be heading down, and that the economy would be growing at about 4% per year.

A 5% unemployment rate as of the end of 2009 would have been seen from a late-2008 perspective as a very good and lucky outcome, and a 10% unemployment rate would have been seen as a very bad and unlucky outcome.

Well, we have been unlucky. Unemployment is not going down but going sideways—we hope that it is still not going up. And the unemployment rate is not 7.5% but 10%. More important, perhaps, is that the expectation is for 3% real GDP growth in 2010.

That leaves us with two major questions: First, why has the outcome thus far been so much worse than what pretty much everyone expected in the late fall of 2008? And second, why is the forecast going forward for growth so much slower than our previous experience with recovery from a deep recession in 1983-84?

Four Factors

I attribute the differences to four factors:

First, the financial collapse of late 2008 did much more damage than we realized—to American households' and businesses' willingness to spend, as well as to the financial system's ability to match savers with cash to businesses that needed to borrow. The shock now looks to have been about twice as great as the consensus in the fall of 2008 thought.

When it comes to fighting economic depressions, governments essentially have two bags of tricks they can pick from: They can directly put the otherwise unemployed to work via deficit spending, or have the central bank boost asset prices and so make it more attractive for businesses to borrow and put the otherwise-unemployed to work. The incoming Obama administration tried to do both.

And that leads us to Factor No. 2. The Obama administration envisioned a $1 trillion short-term deficit-spending stimulus for a problem that turned out to be twice as big as was then understood. In other words, had the administration known how big the problem would turn out to be, it would have sought a $2 trillion stimulus. And what did we get once Congress got through with it? A $600 billion stimulus—about one-third of what we needed.

Making matters worse: The stimulus was not terribly well targeted. In an attempt to attract Republican votes, roughly two-fifths of it was tax cuts. Such temporary cuts are ineffective at boosting spending because too many people will simply save it. (It also failed to win any extra votes.) Roughly two-fifths of the stimulus was infrastructure and other forms of direct federal spending. But it is hard to boost federal spending quickly without wasting money, and those projects that are shovel-ready are not terribly labor intensive.

Meanwhile, the most-effective stimulus would have been aid to the states, which would have kept the states from cutting back on services and do a huge amount of good for employment. But senators don't want to hand out money to governors; the governors then tend to run against the senators and take their jobs away.

This problem with both the quantity and quality of the stimulus is tied up with the third factor: that the Obama administration declared victory on fiscal policy with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—with $600 billion in stimulus money and $200 billion of ineffective transfers to the upper middle class—and then went home.

There was no intensive lobbying for a bigger program, no proposals to introduce triggers into the budget resolution so that if the late-2009 situation appeared dire a second round of deficit spending could be undertaken, no attempts to expand the stimulus programs when it became clear in the spring that the macroeconomic shock had in fact been twice as bad as people had thought. The background chatter is that trying for more deficit spending would have been fruitless, given the broken Senate, the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, and the need to shift our attention in the next couple of years to shrinking the long-term financial hole we're in.
The Fed's Failing

That background chatter is probably right. But even if the recovery act was the largest achievable plan given all those constraints, there is still the Federal Reserve. And that's where the fourth factor comes in.

It is true that as far as normal monetary policy is concerned, the Federal Reserve was tapped out: Its normal purchases of short-term Treasuries for cash had already done all they could do.

more

 

[Amazed]

I don't have my head up anybody's ass. There are things I don't like about Obama. But, the Affordable Healthcare Act is hugely popular when each provisions is polled. The only provision that is not popular is the individual mandate. Which is a Republican idea. Obama, who you folks call a 'socialist', shut out the progressive and liberals during the health care debate. We should have had a public option, or the ability to buy Medicare before you are 65. Obama didn't have the 60 votes needed, because the Senator from Aetna, Joe LIEberman and blue dog Democrats.

The Stimulus Bill was a big success, it was just not big enough. But it did reverse the hemorrhaging of jobs that Bush left him with.

Do you people stand on your head when you read these charts?

Bush handed Obama the worst economy since the great depression. Obama immediately passed a job-stimulus bill which helped stop job losses faster than during the milder 1st Bush recession.

December 9, 2011. The economy was collapsing at its fastest rate since the Great Depression when Obama took office. In his second month he got Congress to pass a jobs stimulus bill worth about $900 billion. This helped stop the collapse and heightened the first spike in job growth. But the Republicans blocked more stimulus and by August 2010, falling stimulus spending began reducing job growth.

Thanks, Mr Krugman. If only Obama had put us deeper in debt, then we'd be all be better off!! yeah, that's the ticket.

Face it bub, Obama is going to be sent home, permanently. He had a chance to be a great leader, he wasted his chance passing a law that will be gutted the moment Romney is sworn in.

I am truly amazed at the lack of understanding the right has of economics. Even this conservative icon understood. Which leads me to believe none of you are conservatives. You are some mutant form of life.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
Edmund Burke

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
Edmund Burke


Stimulus Too Small - The Wall Street Journal

Fourteen months ago, just after Barack Hussein Obama's election, most of us would have bet that the U.S. unemployment rate today would be something like 7.5%, that it would be heading down, and that the economy would be growing at about 4% per year.

A 5% unemployment rate as of the end of 2009 would have been seen from a late-2008 perspective as a very good and lucky outcome, and a 10% unemployment rate would have been seen as a very bad and unlucky outcome.

Well, we have been unlucky. Unemployment is not going down but going sideways—we hope that it is still not going up. And the unemployment rate is not 7.5% but 10%. More important, perhaps, is that the expectation is for 3% real GDP growth in 2010.

That leaves us with two major questions: First, why has the outcome thus far been so much worse than what pretty much everyone expected in the late fall of 2008? And second, why is the forecast going forward for growth so much slower than our previous experience with recovery from a deep recession in 1983-84?

Four Factors

I attribute the differences to four factors:

First, the financial collapse of late 2008 did much more damage than we realized—to American households' and businesses' willingness to spend, as well as to the financial system's ability to match savers with cash to businesses that needed to borrow. The shock now looks to have been about twice as great as the consensus in the fall of 2008 thought.

When it comes to fighting economic depressions, governments essentially have two bags of tricks they can pick from: They can directly put the otherwise unemployed to work via deficit spending, or have the central bank boost asset prices and so make it more attractive for businesses to borrow and put the otherwise-unemployed to work. The incoming Obama administration tried to do both.

And that leads us to Factor No. 2. The Obama administration envisioned a $1 trillion short-term deficit-spending stimulus for a problem that turned out to be twice as big as was then understood. In other words, had the administration known how big the problem would turn out to be, it would have sought a $2 trillion stimulus. And what did we get once Congress got through with it? A $600 billion stimulus—about one-third of what we needed.

Making matters worse: The stimulus was not terribly well targeted. In an attempt to attract Republican votes, roughly two-fifths of it was tax cuts. Such temporary cuts are ineffective at boosting spending because too many people will simply save it. (It also failed to win any extra votes.) Roughly two-fifths of the stimulus was infrastructure and other forms of direct federal spending. But it is hard to boost federal spending quickly without wasting money, and those projects that are shovel-ready are not terribly labor intensive.

Meanwhile, the most-effective stimulus would have been aid to the states, which would have kept the states from cutting back on services and do a huge amount of good for employment. But senators don't want to hand out money to governors; the governors then tend to run against the senators and take their jobs away.

This problem with both the quantity and quality of the stimulus is tied up with the third factor: that the Obama administration declared victory on fiscal policy with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—with $600 billion in stimulus money and $200 billion of ineffective transfers to the upper middle class—and then went home.

There was no intensive lobbying for a bigger program, no proposals to introduce triggers into the budget resolution so that if the late-2009 situation appeared dire a second round of deficit spending could be undertaken, no attempts to expand the stimulus programs when it became clear in the spring that the macroeconomic shock had in fact been twice as bad as people had thought. The background chatter is that trying for more deficit spending would have been fruitless, given the broken Senate, the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, and the need to shift our attention in the next couple of years to shrinking the long-term financial hole we're in.
The Fed's Failing

That background chatter is probably right. But even if the recovery act was the largest achievable plan given all those constraints, there is still the Federal Reserve. And that's where the fourth factor comes in.

It is true that as far as normal monetary policy is concerned, the Federal Reserve was tapped out: Its normal purchases of short-term Treasuries for cash had already done all they could do.

more

What a stupid fuck you are, this "Conservative" Icon?

DeLong is both a liberal in the modern American political sense and a free trade neo-liberal. He has cited Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Andrei Shleifer, Milton Friedman, and Lawrence Summers (with whom he has co-authored numerous papers) as the economists who have had the greatest influence on his views.[4]

DeLong lives in suburban Berkeley, California[5] with his wife Ann Marie Marciarille,[6] AARP Health and Aging Policy Research Fellow at Pacific McGeorge's Capital Center for Government Law and Policy.[7] He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1987). Before moving to Berkeley, he taught at Harvard, Boston University, and MIT.


J. Bradford DeLong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[thereisnospoon]

I don't have my head up anybody's ass. There are things I don't like about Obama. But, the Affordable Healthcare Act is hugely popular when each provisions is polled. The only provision that is not popular is the individual mandate. Which is a Republican idea. Obama, who you folks call a 'socialist', shut out the progressive and liberals during the health care debate. We should have had a public option, or the ability to buy Medicare before you are 65. Obama didn't have the 60 votes needed, because the Senator from Aetna, Joe LIEberman and blue dog Democrats.

The Stimulus Bill was a big success, it was just not big enough. But it did reverse the hemorrhaging of jobs that Bush left him with.

Do you people stand on your head when you read these charts?

Bush handed Obama the worst economy since the great depression. Obama immediately passed a job-stimulus bill which helped stop job losses faster than during the milder 1st Bush recession.

December 9, 2011. The economy was collapsing at its fastest rate since the Great Depression when Obama took office. In his second month he got Congress to pass a jobs stimulus bill worth about $900 billion. This helped stop the collapse and heightened the first spike in job growth. But the Republicans blocked more stimulus and by August 2010, falling stimulus spending began reducing job growth.

Thanks, Mr Krugman. If only Obama had put us deeper in debt, then we'd be all be better off!! yeah, that's the ticket.

Face it bub, Obama is going to be sent home, permanently. He had a chance to be a great leader, he wasted his chance passing a law that will be gutted the moment Romney is sworn in.

I am truly amazed at the lack of understanding the right has of economics. Even this conservative icon understood. Which leads me to believe none of you are conservatives. You are some mutant form of life.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
Edmund Burke

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
Edmund Burke


Stimulus Too Small - The Wall Street Journal

Fourteen months ago, just after Barack Hussein Obama's election, most of us would have bet that the U.S. unemployment rate today would be something like 7.5%, that it would be heading down, and that the economy would be growing at about 4% per year.

A 5% unemployment rate as of the end of 2009 would have been seen from a late-2008 perspective as a very good and lucky outcome, and a 10% unemployment rate would have been seen as a very bad and unlucky outcome.

Well, we have been unlucky. Unemployment is not going down but going sideways—we hope that it is still not going up. And the unemployment rate is not 7.5% but 10%. More important, perhaps, is that the expectation is for 3% real GDP growth in 2010.

That leaves us with two major questions: First, why has the outcome thus far been so much worse than what pretty much everyone expected in the late fall of 2008? And second, why is the forecast going forward for growth so much slower than our previous experience with recovery from a deep recession in 1983-84?

Four Factors

I attribute the differences to four factors:

First, the financial collapse of late 2008 did much more damage than we realized—to American households' and businesses' willingness to spend, as well as to the financial system's ability to match savers with cash to businesses that needed to borrow. The shock now looks to have been about twice as great as the consensus in the fall of 2008 thought.

When it comes to fighting economic depressions, governments essentially have two bags of tricks they can pick from: They can directly put the otherwise unemployed to work via deficit spending, or have the central bank boost asset prices and so make it more attractive for businesses to borrow and put the otherwise-unemployed to work. The incoming Obama administration tried to do both.

And that leads us to Factor No. 2. The Obama administration envisioned a $1 trillion short-term deficit-spending stimulus for a problem that turned out to be twice as big as was then understood. In other words, had the administration known how big the problem would turn out to be, it would have sought a $2 trillion stimulus. And what did we get once Congress got through with it? A $600 billion stimulus—about one-third of what we needed.

Making matters worse: The stimulus was not terribly well targeted. In an attempt to attract Republican votes, roughly two-fifths of it was tax cuts. Such temporary cuts are ineffective at boosting spending because too many people will simply save it. (It also failed to win any extra votes.) Roughly two-fifths of the stimulus was infrastructure and other forms of direct federal spending. But it is hard to boost federal spending quickly without wasting money, and those projects that are shovel-ready are not terribly labor intensive.

Meanwhile, the most-effective stimulus would have been aid to the states, which would have kept the states from cutting back on services and do a huge amount of good for employment. But senators don't want to hand out money to governors; the governors then tend to run against the senators and take their jobs away.

This problem with both the quantity and quality of the stimulus is tied up with the third factor: that the Obama administration declared victory on fiscal policy with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—with $600 billion in stimulus money and $200 billion of ineffective transfers to the upper middle class—and then went home.

There was no intensive lobbying for a bigger program, no proposals to introduce triggers into the budget resolution so that if the late-2009 situation appeared dire a second round of deficit spending could be undertaken, no attempts to expand the stimulus programs when it became clear in the spring that the macroeconomic shock had in fact been twice as bad as people had thought. The background chatter is that trying for more deficit spending would have been fruitless, given the broken Senate, the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, and the need to shift our attention in the next couple of years to shrinking the long-term financial hole we're in.
The Fed's Failing

That background chatter is probably right. But even if the recovery act was the largest achievable plan given all those constraints, there is still the Federal Reserve. And that's where the fourth factor comes in.

It is true that as far as normal monetary policy is concerned, the Federal Reserve was tapped out: Its normal purchases of short-term Treasuries for cash had already done all they could do.

more

This is mere opinion. Which means that and $1.39 will get you a large coffee.

 

[Chris]

Romney's only strong stand on anything in his entire political career is not releasing his taxes.

He must be hiding something pretty big.

 

[Chris]

If Republicans want smaller government, they should move to Somalia.

 

[Listening]

Romney's only strong stand on anything in his entire political career is not releasing his taxes.

He must be hiding something pretty big.

So are you...your head is hidden in your ass.

 

[Listening]

If Republicans want smaller government, they should move to Somalia.

If American wants a higher overall I.Q., they'll move you to Denmark.

 

[P@triot]

If Republicans want smaller government, they should move to Somalia.

Considering this nation was built on smaller government, and has a signed law that requires small, limited government, I would say we shouldn't (and won't be) moving any where. You pro-communist assholes are the one's who should be moving to Cuba. Funny how it's everything you want, yet you strangely refuse to go...

 

[Dr Grump]

If Republicans want smaller government, they should move to Somalia.

Considering this nation was built on smaller government, and has a signed law that requires small, limited government, I would say we shouldn't (and won't be) moving any where. You pro-communist assholes are the one's who should be moving to Cuba. Funny how it's everything you want, yet you strangely refuse to go...

Your hero Bush increased the Govt by some margin when he put in the Patriot Act...

 

[P@triot]

Romney's only strong stand on anything in his entire political career is not releasing his taxes.

He must be hiding something pretty big.

And oddly, Harry Reid is refusing to release any of his taxes. Since Romney is releasing at least some of his, and Reid is refusing to release ANY of his, who is the one with something to hide?

You're a partisan hack and a closet communist. You don't even have the courage to have an honest conversation about who and what you are...

 

[Bfgrn]

Thanks, Mr Krugman. If only Obama had put us deeper in debt, then we'd be all be better off!! yeah, that's the ticket.

Face it bub, Obama is going to be sent home, permanently. He had a chance to be a great leader, he wasted his chance passing a law that will be gutted the moment Romney is sworn in.

I am truly amazed at the lack of understanding the right has of economics. Even this conservative icon understood. Which leads me to believe none of you are conservatives. You are some mutant form of life.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
Edmund Burke

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
Edmund Burke


Stimulus Too Small - The Wall Street Journal

Fourteen months ago, just after Barack Hussein Obama's election, most of us would have bet that the U.S. unemployment rate today would be something like 7.5%, that it would be heading down, and that the economy would be growing at about 4% per year.

A 5% unemployment rate as of the end of 2009 would have been seen from a late-2008 perspective as a very good and lucky outcome, and a 10% unemployment rate would have been seen as a very bad and unlucky outcome.

Well, we have been unlucky. Unemployment is not going down but going sideways—we hope that it is still not going up. And the unemployment rate is not 7.5% but 10%. More important, perhaps, is that the expectation is for 3% real GDP growth in 2010.

That leaves us with two major questions: First, why has the outcome thus far been so much worse than what pretty much everyone expected in the late fall of 2008? And second, why is the forecast going forward for growth so much slower than our previous experience with recovery from a deep recession in 1983-84?

Four Factors

I attribute the differences to four factors:

First, the financial collapse of late 2008 did much more damage than we realized—to American households' and businesses' willingness to spend, as well as to the financial system's ability to match savers with cash to businesses that needed to borrow. The shock now looks to have been about twice as great as the consensus in the fall of 2008 thought.

When it comes to fighting economic depressions, governments essentially have two bags of tricks they can pick from: They can directly put the otherwise unemployed to work via deficit spending, or have the central bank boost asset prices and so make it more attractive for businesses to borrow and put the otherwise-unemployed to work. The incoming Obama administration tried to do both.

And that leads us to Factor No. 2. The Obama administration envisioned a $1 trillion short-term deficit-spending stimulus for a problem that turned out to be twice as big as was then understood. In other words, had the administration known how big the problem would turn out to be, it would have sought a $2 trillion stimulus. And what did we get once Congress got through with it? A $600 billion stimulus—about one-third of what we needed.

Making matters worse: The stimulus was not terribly well targeted. In an attempt to attract Republican votes, roughly two-fifths of it was tax cuts. Such temporary cuts are ineffective at boosting spending because too many people will simply save it. (It also failed to win any extra votes.) Roughly two-fifths of the stimulus was infrastructure and other forms of direct federal spending. But it is hard to boost federal spending quickly without wasting money, and those projects that are shovel-ready are not terribly labor intensive.

Meanwhile, the most-effective stimulus would have been aid to the states, which would have kept the states from cutting back on services and do a huge amount of good for employment. But senators don't want to hand out money to governors; the governors then tend to run against the senators and take their jobs away.

This problem with both the quantity and quality of the stimulus is tied up with the third factor: that the Obama administration declared victory on fiscal policy with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—with $600 billion in stimulus money and $200 billion of ineffective transfers to the upper middle class—and then went home.

There was no intensive lobbying for a bigger program, no proposals to introduce triggers into the budget resolution so that if the late-2009 situation appeared dire a second round of deficit spending could be undertaken, no attempts to expand the stimulus programs when it became clear in the spring that the macroeconomic shock had in fact been twice as bad as people had thought. The background chatter is that trying for more deficit spending would have been fruitless, given the broken Senate, the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, and the need to shift our attention in the next couple of years to shrinking the long-term financial hole we're in.
The Fed's Failing

That background chatter is probably right. But even if the recovery act was the largest achievable plan given all those constraints, there is still the Federal Reserve. And that's where the fourth factor comes in.

It is true that as far as normal monetary policy is concerned, the Federal Reserve was tapped out: Its normal purchases of short-term Treasuries for cash had already done all they could do.

more

What a stupid fuck you are, this "Conservative" Icon?

DeLong is both a liberal in the modern American political sense and a free trade neo-liberal. He has cited Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Andrei Shleifer, Milton Friedman, and Lawrence Summers (with whom he has co-authored numerous papers) as the economists who have had the greatest influence on his views.[4]

DeLong lives in suburban Berkeley, California[5] with his wife Ann Marie Marciarille,[6] AARP Health and Aging Policy Research Fellow at Pacific McGeorge's Capital Center for Government Law and Policy.[7] He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1987). Before moving to Berkeley, he taught at Harvard, Boston University, and MIT.


J. Bradford DeLong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I was talking about Edmund Burke...

And, btw Adam Smith is a conservative icon (invisible hand), as so is Milton Friedman. Friedman was an economic adviser to Ronald Reagan. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention.

 

[Vel]

Romney's only strong stand on anything in his entire political career is not releasing his taxes.

He must be hiding something pretty big.

And oddly, Harry Reid is refusing to release any of his taxes. Since Romney is releasing at least some of his, and Reid is refusing to release ANY of his, who is the one with something to hide?

You're a partisan hack and a closet communist. You don't even have the courage to have an honest conversation about who and what you are...

Wait for it. The response will be that," Reid isn't running for POTUS". The problem with that response is that Harry Reif has much more to do with setting tax policy that the POTUS does and is far more likely to have a conflict of interest their. That makes Reid's taxes far more germane.

 

[Clementine]

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Obama is taking an interesting and dangerous approach on the campaign trail, telling successful business owners that they "didn't get there on their own", that their success is predicated in part on the labor and efforts (and taxes) of others. This gives the GOP an opening to say, "see, he hates business owners, we told you so."

On the other hand, it opens up a national conversation that I've never seen before, building on Elizabeth Warren's comments as she runs for office.

This tactic is flying right into the teeth of the GOP's strength, that business and employers are the key to economic success. He's betting that the GOP, so controlled by absolutists right now, is going to look anti-ALL workers, not just union.

Pretty brave, and I think it's a good conversation to have.

Obama Mocks Rich: 'You Didn't Get There On Your Own'

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Does anyone on the left believe that people get credit for anything they do? Considering how many people are on welfare, receive every benefit known to mankind, from education to living expenses and then rely on affirmative action to tilt the playing field (not level it), of course many believe that a person should turn around and thank government for their success. Some should. A thank you to the tax payers would be nice, but since they feel entitled to the fruits of our labors, I'm not holding my breath.

Obama didn't get there on his own. Of course, he sealed his records so no one will know the extent of the help. He didn't earn the Nobel Peace prize, so others handed that to him.

Obama has never started or run a business so he has no idea how they came to exist or why they get successful. He's an idiot and pandering to a group of people who are so clueless about how the country works that they'll believe this crap.

 

[Full-Auto]

"You didn't get there on your own"

 

[Uncensored2008]

what could possibly be the end game for our brain dead liberals now the Hitler Stalin Mao Tojo Castro Pot pot, and now Europe have failed???

It hasn't changed.

What the left values, the ONLY thing the left values, is order. The goal remains a global dictatorship that will impose order on humanity, that will force people to obey without question or resistance.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Listening to you just reinforces a universal truth.

Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of people, tempered by fear.
William E. Gladstone

Leftism is the rule of people without compassion or mercy.

 

[Bfgrn]

Listening to you just reinforces a universal truth.

Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of people, tempered by fear.
William E. Gladstone

Leftism is the rule of people without compassion or mercy.

Yea, the people who created Medicare, the Civil Rights bill, Social Security and ended child slavery, NOW want to kill them all...