I can derail the thread AND stay on topic. I heard that in the stimulus money there was a grant given to some scientists to see if Angels do exist and what it would take to rape them. By the way, I would appreciate it if people didn't edit posts or delete threads unless there was a possible violation of federal law in them. If you said it, I want to read it.
IDK if this was mentioned in this thread already. I'm not going one way or another on this, I just saw this was on the Yahoo! front page and thought it was relevant. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_stimulus_jobs Gov't says stimulus saved or created 650,000 jobs
Why don't they just say they saved or created 2,000,000 jobs? 20,000,000? The basic issue is that "saved" jobs isn't a metric that can be measured, which has been acknowledged by economists across the political spectrum.
Today's stimulus jobs are tomorrow's lay-offs. You cannot artificially stimulate the economy, sooner or later it is going to correct itself.
I think you are missing the point. The idea here is not to make permanent improvements, the idea is to make the bottom of the recession trough not quite as deep as it would have been otherwise. barfo
This is true. The "saved" business is just politics. Not that this is the first administration to play games with numbers. If I remember correctly Reagan actually redefined unemployment, so that fewer people were counted as unemployed. barfo
by extending the problem further into the future by borrowing money the US doesn't have to create non-essential jobs for the sake of creating them?
Two wrongs don't make a right. When you see something that's bullshit, you shouldn't make an excuse for it. You should call bullshit. And this saved jobs idea is bullshit.
who's to say that it actually did anything to "flatten" this mythical trough you are referring to that time wouldn't have fixed on its own? This stimulus program was used to fund special pet project programs that the democrats wanted to implement. It was so rushed that it was just throwing cash.
I didn't make an excuse for it. I said it was just politics (meaning, has no value beyond politics). I did observe that your hero did the same sort of thing. Sorry if that bothers you. barfo
Well, various economists. There are various economists who would disagree, too. So we'll never know for sure. I don't think the recession was "mythical", however. I'm pretty sure every economist agrees we were in a recession. barfo
You know as well as I do (probably better) that a commitment to spend money works as a stimulus. barfo
If it was so rushed then why is so little of it spent? This "mythical" trough seems to have been identified and discovered by many economists. So I guess they're all "mythical" too, eh? The problem is that sometime people think only of the here and now. On the Democrat side, they don't foresee (or at least I'd say those in Congress) the effects of huge deficits in later years. On the Republican side, they refuse to see that things could very easily have/will/could have spiraled out of control. If you don't start patching up the bottom of the boat while you're taking on water, you sink.
You don't think the stimulus bill was rushed? The fact that so little of it is spent is of little relevance here to this ill-thought of, shot in the dark and haphazard infusion of cash into the economy.
