For Krugman followers: How much debt would be acceptable?

[elucidator]

…know that the standard fall back line is that the stimulus wasn’t big enough…

Because its true? Maybe that’s why its the standard “fall back”. Would you rather be told something patently false just for the variety?

[XT]

It’s only ‘true’ in the fact that some people THINK it’s true. This is not a universally accepted truth, like saying water is wet. Surely you know that it’s a debatable point, yes?

-XT

[foolsguinea]

@furt

No. For one, even if you erase the Iraq, Afghanistan and Lybia deployments and move tax rates (all of them, even the ones Obama wants to keep down) back to where they were under Clinton, we are still running a large and growing deficit.

This is true.

For two, I take it as a given at this point that over any significant period of time there will be more “unexpected crises.” Iraq is ending, but in 2017 it’ll be Iran, or Egypt in 2019, or Congo 2021, or some other place where we decide they need Marines. Or just as we “had to” bail out a series of mortgage, financial and automotive companies, in 2015 we’ll find out that that it’s vital we bail out IBM or Disney. Or California and Illinois. The point is, once you set the precedent that every problem can and will be fixed courtesy of the US taxpayer, those problems keep appearing. And of course a recession every 10 years or so is pretty much a given, and thus ought to be incorporated into our planning … but never is.

Fair point. See, we can agree!

For three, saying “our problem is the lack of revenue” seems to assume that somehow we can/should just keep raising taxes until we get enough to pay for all the stuff we want to spend on. Since the last time we were balanced (2000), our revenue has gone up ~20% … but our spending has doubled.

Thing is, it’s been the case for decades that the economy doubles every ten years. That 20% increase is actually a 40% shortfall adjusted for growth.

I remember when the economic right claimed to believe in and prioritize growth. But I think the base doesn’t really believe in it, & doesn’t get how much it has been happening–maybe because they have not shared in it.

[foolsguinea]

@furt

So, yeah, I guess you can say the problem is revenue, if you’re of the opinion that the federal government under Clinton was just way too small.

How do we judge “too large” or “too small”? If it’s just gross numbers, why should I think the government too big & not consider Ross Perot’s personal fortune too big? The rhetoric that wants to reduce government just because it’s so vast & controls so much wealth, with a bit of evolution, could turn into leveling & make as much sense.

On the other hand, if we actually studied government departments, & judged how effectively they achieve their missions, we might find that some are too small to be effective. Would you accept (hypothetical numbers) raising non-defense discretionary spending by 11% of GDP while cutting Medicare by 2.5% of GDP & defense by 3% of GDP, losing votes all the way? Most politicians won’t. But that’s the sort of decision that comes from trying to make government effective at protecting the country & punishing wrongdoers, rather than just pandering and winning elections.

[Lantern]

Well I would say the stimulus was a moderate success. As mentioned earlier, revised GDP figures show Q42008 saw the worst collapse of GDP since the Depression. To get a sense of how bad it was, the worst quarter since WW2 saw GDP declining by about 2.5%. Q4 saw a decline of 8.9%. This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill recession.

From that baseline achieving 2-3% growth by early 2010 is a remarkable turnaround so it’s not crazy to believe that a bigger stimulus would have produced even better results. And this is not some argument made up after the fact. Krugman was forcefully arguing the stimulus was too small way back in early 2009 even before it was passed.

[Dick_Dastardly]

@Sam_Stone

Why don’t you go back and read what I actually said? I said that crowding out would happen if the stimulus money didn’t go to idle resources. I specifically said that I wasn’t talking about money - I was talking about diverting productive resources like engineers and architects from projects they were already working on to government projects of lesser value. Hell, I even posted several real-world examples of this happening.

As for what the Wall Street Journal says… I’m not their apologist or their gatekeeper. Hell, I don’t even read the paper, so I have no idea what they’re saying. Among the economists I read, none of them were predicting a scenario of declining growth and rising interest rates. What some of them were saying (and still are) is that if you grow the monetary base but velocity falls, you won’t see inflation - because there’s no expansion of the money supply. But the problem you then run into is that if the growth does start and velocity picks up, you’re setting the stage for inflation at that point. So when the economy heats up, inflation happens, interest rates go up, and that chokes off the recovery. You either wind up with stagflation, or a long period of low growth and moderate interest rates and moderate inflation.

Hell, even Bernanke admits this possibility. His answer is to unwind the injection of capital from QE1 and QE2 by selling off the treasuries the Fed purchased, I believe. Of course, that presupposes that there are enough buyers for it all.

This is all an untested assertion of course, since the economy has not ‘heated up’. Of course, it was YOUR side that was predicting a robust recovery, due in part to the magic of stimulus. I was the one on this board predicting a ‘lost decade’ of perpetual low growth. Since we’re playing the recrimination/absolution game, will you now admit that you were wrong about that?

Here’s the first of endless examples of you claiming that government borrowoing would crowd out private investment :

*Where the broken window fallacy comes in is in the unstated assumption that government is just as good at allocating that trillion dollars as is the private sector, and therefore there will be no economic loss from borrowing the trillion in the first place. This is, frankly, a load of crap. The government’s manipulation of the economy will distort prices, divert investment, crowd out private capital, and do other bad things. *

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10748089&postcount=10

You’re making a flat statement that government borrowing will cause crowding out of private investment, and there are endless other examples. Here’s another one :

*But the worst fallacy about the ‘jobs created’ statistic is that it doesn’t even consider jobs that may have displaced private sector jobs, any negative effects from borrowing a trillion dollars (crowding out private capital, devaluing the dollar, increasing uncertainty about the future, private reductions in investment due to the permanent income theory). *

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=11791304#post11791304
I’d like you to provide an example of “my side” predicting a robust recovery, or any example of me specifically predicting a robust recovery. I actually predicted a Japanese-style lost decade at best, I said the banks were still bust and there was going to be big trouble in the eurozone as you can see from the posts below:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12145458&postcount=61

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12224076&postcount=73

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12397006&postcount=6

I absolutely challenge you to find any post i made on this board that backs up your claim.
I’d also like to point out that your “prediction” was entirely down to your ideology. There’s no way you could have predicted anything good happening with Obama running the show.

Here’s a much better example of your predictive abilities, a thread you started a few years ago:
How’s the ‘Bush Economy’ doing now?
A few years ago, there were plenty of threads criticising the economic performance of the Bush administration. Lots of threads decrying the loss of jobs, the deficits, the tax cuts, benefiting the rich against the poor, etc.

My position at the time was that it was too early to tell. Two years into an administration isn’t enough time to see its effect on the economy. The tax cuts hadn’t been fully implemented. I said at the time that if Bush was elected to a second term, a true measure of his economic policy would be the performance of the economy in his ‘out years’.

Well, here we are in the 5th year of the Bush administration. I’ve been looking at the latest economic indicators, and they look pretty darned good. Specifically:

[ul]
[li]GDP growth close to 4% per annum[/li][li]Unemployment at 5%[/li][li]3.7 million jobs created in the last two years[/li][li]A rapidly shrinking deficit[/li][li]Tax receipts up 15% last year, mostly from the rich. This is the biggest annual rise in tax receipts since the early 1980s.[/li][li]Business investment up 11% this year[/li][li]Low inflation, low interest rates[/li][/ul]

This despite rapidly rising energy costs which generally act as a brake on the economy.

Especially encouraging is the rapid decline in the deficit, far ahead of original White House estimates. It has been revised downwards by 100 billion dollars just this year alone, and is now forecast to be about $330 billion, which in terms of GDP is almost down to half of its peak a couple of years ago, and far lower than the large deficits in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s.

This last seems to be somewhat of a vindication of the supply-side nature of the tax cuts. Revenues are soaring, and tax rates are low.

So, what do you think? Does the Bush administration deserve credit for maintaining a good economy in difficult times? Have the tax cuts turned out to be not quite the disaster that some predicted?

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=6421860#post6421860

[Lantern]

@Lantern

Take a look at the [[id]=GDPC1&s[1][transformation]=pc1"]graph](Federal Reserve Economic Data | FRED | St. Louis Fed[1)of recessions since the world war. The 2009 recovery was in fact a dramatic V-shaped recovery, much more so than the previous two recessions. And keep in mind this is based on the old data. The recovery would look even more dramatic with the new data which shows a 8.9% decline in Q4 2008 which is truly Great Depression territory.

A correction: I have been digging into the BEA data and the 8.9% number is for QoQ and not YoY. So the above graph is in fact correct. Still the basic point remains: if you look at the graph the worst YoY number before the last recession was about -2.5% whereas this time it hit -5% before recovering dramatically.

[Sam_Stone]

@Dick_Dastardly

Here’s the first of endless examples of you claiming that government borrowoing would crowd out private investment :

*Where the broken window fallacy comes in is in the unstated assumption that government is just as good at allocating that trillion dollars as is the private sector, and therefore there will be no economic loss from borrowing the trillion in the first place. This is, frankly, a load of crap. The government’s manipulation of the economy will distort prices, divert investment, crowd out private capital, and do other bad things. *

The assumption of that paragraph is that the government actually IS crowding out private capital. As I said, I’ve been saying all along that the issue is that there aren’t enough idle resources. It’s not a monetary policy argument. I gave specific examples of what I was talking about. For example, even in a weak economy your top-level engineers, lawyers, and architects are likely to be employed doing productive things, but you need such people to start large infrastructure projects. So you have to hire them away from current projects, diverting capital and distorting the markets.

Crowding out private capital can happen if the government ‘creates jobs’ by giving stimulus money to a company which uses it to underbid a contract, preventing another company from winning it. It looks like jobs were created, because you don’t see the jobs lost in the company that didn’t get the stimulus.

You’re making a flat statement that government borrowing will cause crowding out of private investment, and there are endless other examples. Here’s another one :

*But the worst fallacy about the ‘jobs created’ statistic is that it doesn’t even consider jobs that may have displaced private sector jobs, any negative effects from borrowing a trillion dollars (crowding out private capital, devaluing the dollar, increasing uncertainty about the future, private reductions in investment due to the permanent income theory). *

I will grant that in this circumstance there is plenty of private capital available. But uncertainty HAS increased, and the American dollar has been devalued by about 10% since I wrote that.

The private reductions in investment due to the permanent income hypothesis has not been disproven. If the market treats a large deficit as a future tax increase, then stimulus money will be offset by companies withholding capital because their future liabilities have gone up. It doesn’t help when the president routinely comes out and calls businessmen names and says he’s gunning for them.

And surveys of small businessmen today show that the biggest factor holding them back from investing more money is uncertainty, and they all say that the government has made it worse.

I’d like you to provide an example of “my side” predicting a robust recovery

Really? You need an example? Exhibit A: the proposed Obama FY2010 budget. Here are the White’s House’s predictions for growth starting from 2010:

2009: -1.2%
2010: 3.2%
2011: 4.0%
2012: 4.6%
2013: 4.2%

That’s a pretty robust, ‘V’ shaped recovery. The Obama administration predicted that ‘V’ shaped recovery repeatedly in interviews and speeches. And given those marching orders, the supporters of the administration repeated it over and over again.

Now the reality: Economic growth in the last quarter was 1.3%, and in the first quarter it was 0.4%. Obama said it would be 4% this year. It’s likely to be around 1%, or the U.S> may already be in a double-dip recession.

or any example of me specifically predicting a robust recovery. I actually predicted a Japanese-style lost decade at best, I said the banks were still bust and there was going to be big trouble in the eurozone as you can see from the posts below

I absolutely challenge you to find any post i made on this board that backs up your claim.

You know what? I’ll concede that point to you because I’ll trust your word on that, and plus I have a lot better things to do than to search this message board for examples I can dredge up from the past to play ‘gotcha’ games. Life is too short.

I’d also like to point out that your “prediction” was entirely down to your ideology. There’s no way you could have predicted anything good happening with Obama running the show.

Well you say that, but the fact is I’ve been pretty correct about my predictions. Not perfect I’m sure - if I was, I’d go and make a fortune in the market.

Here’s a much better example of your predictive abilities, a thread you started a few years ago:
How’s the ‘Bush Economy’ doing now?
A few years ago, there were plenty of threads criticising the economic performance of the Bush administration. Lots of threads decrying the loss of jobs, the deficits, the tax cuts, benefiting the rich against the poor, etc.

My position at the time was that it was too early to tell. Two years into an administration isn’t enough time to see its effect on the economy. The tax cuts hadn’t been fully implemented. I said at the time that if Bush was elected to a second term, a true measure of his economic policy would be the performance of the economy in his ‘out years’.

Well, here we are in the 5th year of the Bush administration. I’ve been looking at the latest economic indicators, and they look pretty darned good. Specifically:

[ul]
[li]GDP growth close to 4% per annum[/li][li]Unemployment at 5%[/li][li]3.7 million jobs created in the last two years[/li][li]A rapidly shrinking deficit[/li][li]Tax receipts up 15% last year, mostly from the rich. This is the biggest annual rise in tax receipts since the early 1980s.[/li][li]Business investment up 11% this year[/li][li]Low inflation, low interest rates[/li][/ul]

Etc… In fact, all of that was correct. Notice I didn’t actually make any predictions - I simply described the economy as it was at the time. And in fact, just before the crash government revenue had recovered from the drop it took when Bush first cut taxes, and then went on to near all-time highs.

Now, obviously a lot of the ‘credit’ for these numbers has to go to the real estate bubble and to the fed holding rates artificially low, stimulating the economy. But I didn’t know that at the time, and neither did anyone else. At the time I wrote that, we didn’t know about the ticking time bomb in the financial system.

If you want to criticize me for not having special powers that revealed to me problems that even professional fund managers and economists didn’t see, then I guess I’m guilty as charged.

[clairobscur]

@LonghornDave

My question is specifically for the Krugman followers or Keynesians in general. You believe the stimulus wasn’t large enough and you are able to do a second stimulus plan. How big would it be? How much debt would be acceptable to take on during this recovery? ?

I can’t answer to your precise qestion, not being an American and all that, but generally speaking for western countries, the public debt was left to raise for many years (and in the case of the USA, abruptly so during the 00s) and then a major crisis invited itself when this debt level was becoming untenable (and of course, the crisis ate into the income, hence aggravated the situation).

Which resulted in an impossible situation where you’d neeed at the same time to reduce the public debt and stimulate the economy (and doing both right now). Which are of course contradictory goals. In this situation, I don’t think there’s any good option, and it’s almost a matter of taste (rather, it depends a lot of what you expect is going to happen. A recovery soon? A lenghty, awful, recession?).

Personnally I would think that the better would be a small cut on expenses/raise in taxes to at least limit the public deficit for the time being, but then again, a country could end up being forced into massive cuts (see Spain, etc…) by the perceived risk of a Greece-style mega-crisis. Obviously, it’s going to depend on the country, but with some exceptions (Switzerland, Norway,etc… and to some extend Germany), all western countries are currently between a rock and a hard place.

[Dick_Dastardly]

@Sam_Stone

1. The assumption of that paragraph is that the government actually IS crowding out private capital. As I said, I’ve been saying all along that the issue is that there aren’t enough idle resources. It’s not a monetary policy argument. I gave specific examples of what I was talking about. For example, even in a weak economy your top-level engineers, lawyers, and architects are likely to be employed doing productive things, but you need such people to start large infrastructure projects. So you have to hire them away from current projects, diverting capital and distorting the markets.

Crowding out private capital can happen if the government ‘creates jobs’ by giving stimulus money to a company which uses it to underbid a contract, preventing another company from winning it. It looks like jobs were created, because you don’t see the jobs lost in the company that didn’t get the stimulus.

1. I will grant that in this circumstance there is plenty of private capital available. But uncertainty HAS increased, and the American dollar has been devalued by about 10% since I wrote that.

The private reductions in investment due to the permanent income hypothesis has not been disproven. If the market treats a large deficit as a future tax increase, then stimulus money will be offset by companies withholding capital because their future liabilities have gone up.

2. It doesn’t help when the president routinely comes out and calls businessmen names and says he’s gunning for them.

3. And surveys of small businessmen today show that the biggest factor holding them back from investing more money is uncertainty, and they all say that the government has made it worse.

4. Really? You need an example? Exhibit A: the proposed Obama FY2010 budget. Here are the White’s House’s predictions for growth starting from 2010:

2009: -1.2%
2010: 3.2%
2011: 4.0%
2012: 4.6%
2013: 4.2%

That’s a pretty robust, ‘V’ shaped recovery. The Obama administration predicted that ‘V’ shaped recovery repeatedly in interviews and speeches. And given those marching orders, the supporters of the administration repeated it over and over again.

Now the reality: Economic growth in the last quarter was 1.3%, and in the first quarter it was 0.4%. Obama said it would be 4% this year. It’s likely to be around 1%, or the U.S> may already be in a double-dip recession.

5. You know what? I’ll concede that point to you because I’ll trust your word on that, and plus I have a lot better things to do than to search this message board for examples I can dredge up from the past to play ‘gotcha’ games. Life is too short.

Well you say that, but the fact is I’ve been pretty correct about my predictions. Not perfect I’m sure - if I was, I’d go and make a fortune in the market.

6. Etc… In fact, all of that was correct. Notice I didn’t actually make any predictions - I simply described the economy as it was at the time. And in fact, just before the crash government revenue had recovered from the drop it took when Bush first cut taxes, and then went on to near all-time highs.

Now, obviously a lot of the ‘credit’ for these numbers has to go to the real estate bubble and to the fed holding rates artificially low, stimulating the economy. But I didn’t know that at the time, and neither did anyone else. At the time I wrote that, we didn’t know about the ticking time bomb in the financial system.

If you want to criticize me for not having special powers that revealed to me problems that even professional fund managers and economists didn’t see, then I guess I’m guilty as charged.

1. In both these cases you were making a flat statement that crowding out was going to happen. So your original claim that nobody was claiming increases in interest rates/inflation until the economy recovered is absolutely incorrect.

2. Provide cites to this routine guinning for small businessmen by Obama.

3. Provide cites that show the biggest problem for business is uncertainty. I’ll be amazed if you can provide anything reputable because small business surveys actually have lackl of demand as their top problem. When you provide cites, I’ll repost mine from previous arguments.

4. i’m not on Obama’s side. Nobody on the left, people like Krugman etc. took those claims seriously and specifically said that the stimulus was too small to bring about any recovery.

5. I’m glad you conceded the point. And don’t give me that nonsense about having no time, you spend half your life on this board. I actually don’t have a lot of time but a one minute search and F3 brought me more examples that i could ever post.

6. I’m just posting it to give people a laugh, i’m happy for them to make up their own minds how correct you were.

[Shodan]

@Dick_Dastardly

Nobody on the left, people like Krugman etc. took those claims seriously and specifically said that the stimulus was too small to bring about any recovery.

You need to be more careful to make statements that are un-falsifiable instead of false.

Rather than questioning the recovery, the “more valid debate” is whether the V-shaped pattern that’s emerged is “the left side of a ‘W’ or [part of] a square root sign,” Sonders says. “More likely the worst-case scenario is a square-root type recovery. Other than some massive policy mistake akin to the 1930s…the risks of a [‘W’-shaped double-dip] are relatively low.”

Cite.

A V-Shaped Boom Is Coming.

A viable “V” shaped recovery in the economy and markets has now become the accepted view.

Let me guess - No True Scotsman believed there would be a V-shaped recovery.

Regards,
Shodan

[Sam_Stone]

@Dick_Dastardly

1. In both these cases you were making a flat statement that crowding out was going to happen. So your original claim that nobody was claiming increases in interest rates/inflation until the economy recovered is absolutely incorrect.

Actually, there’s plenty of evidence of crowding out. One of the papers I cited from last year found that states that had the biggest injections of stimulus spending also had the largest subsequent drops in private sector business investment. Another paper I’ve already linked to found that the stimulus created jobs in the public sector, but destroyed them in the private sector.

2. Provide cites to this routine gunning for small businessmen by Obama.

Oh, come on. Half the stuff he says, from his ‘spread the wealth around’ comment to Joe the Plumber during the campaign, to his comment that some people ‘have made enough money’, to his constant refrain that the rich aren’t pulling their weight, to his demagoguing the issue of corporate jets (which caused an instant fall in orders to Cessna and other American light aircraft manufacturers) has spooked businessmen.

Kansas politicians, business leaders, aviation workers protest Obama’s comments on business jets

NBAA Blasts Obama’s Comments on Business Aviation

3. Provide cites that show the biggest problem for business is uncertainty. I’ll be amazed if you can provide anything reputable because small business surveys actually have lackl of demand as their top problem. When you provide cites, I’ll repost mine from previous arguments.

Really?

Chamber of Commerce Reveals Small Business Uncertainty

Nearly three quarters of American small-business owners believe that uncertainty in Washington is creating the largest impediment for growth in their businesses, a new survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce finds.

But hey, what do they know? They’re only the people who own the businesses. I’m sure the Professor in Washington knows much more about what they need, right?

5. I’m glad you conceded the point. And don’t give me that nonsense about having no time, you spend half your life on this board. I actually don’t have a lot of time but a one minute search and F3 brought me more examples that i could ever post.

No, you don’t understand. I could find the time, but I don’t care. I don’t care if YOU have been inconsistent in the past, because I’m not interested in ad-hominem attacks. Every time you go digging through 12 years of archives to post a ‘gotcha’ about ME, you make the debate personal. You attack the person instead of the substance of what the person is saying. That means you lose. It’s a hijack of the thread, it wastes everyone’s time, and it’s not relevant. I could be the biggest opinion-changing prevaricator on the planet, and it wouldn’t matter to whatever argument I happen to be making at any given time.

You seem to be fine with turning Great Debates into your personal white whale and wasting everyone’s time with personal attacks. I find that extremely tedious, which is why I ignore most things you have to say. And I’m damned sure not going to adopt your loathsome tactics.

6. I’m just posting it to give people a laugh, i’m happy for them to make up their own minds how correct you were.

Funny, but I suspect most people don’t find it all that amusing, given that it’s a constant distraction from the debates people are trying to have.

[elucidator]

Gosh, Sam, really? The thoroughly non-partisan, unbiased Chamber of Commerce? Can’t ask for better than that, given that they are so even-handed in their views of President Obama, with half thinking he’s the Antichrist, and the other half leaning towards Stalin.

But I do note a bit of slipperiness there. For instance, the TL:DR précis of the report says:

Nearly three quarters of American small-business owners believe that uncertainty in Washington is creating the largest impediment for growth in their businesses, a new survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce finds.

But in the body of the test, the actual results appears as:

…79 percent of small-business owners said they wanted to have more certainty from Washington…

Not quite the same thing, now is it, Sam? What they said was they wanted more certainty, and one can surely understand that. But to claim that what they were saying by “wanting more certainty” was that this uncertainty was a crushing burden, “the largest impediment for growth in their businesses”…? What? Huh?

Mind if we call you “Stretch”?

(Some of us actually read cites, Sam. Be warned.)

[Sam_Stone]

@elucidator

Gosh, Sam, really? The thoroughly non-partisan, unbiased Chamber of Commerce? Can’t ask for better than that, given that they are so even-handed in their views of President Obama, with half thinking he’s the Antichrist, and the other half leaning towards Stalin.

So, you’re expecting that the people who believe they are being hurt by Washington should be supporters, and the fact that they aren’t means their claims of being hurt are just the result of bias?

Think about that. Also think about the fact that a survey of small businessmen in the country found that:

[ul]
[li]79 percent of small-business owners said they wanted to have more certainty from Washington, while 14 percent said they wanted more government assistance.[/li][li]80 percent said the nation’s debt and deficit have a negative impact on their businesses.[/li][li]72 percent said the health reform law passed last year has made hiring more difficult.[/li][li]70 percent said they did not plan to hire new workers next year, while 9 percent planned to continue with layoffs.[/li][li]73 percent said they found regulations imposed by Washington to be unreasonable, while 63 percent said the same thing of state regulations.[/li][li]75 percent said President Barack Obama was standing in the way of growth and progress.[/li][li]87 percent reached the same conclusion about Congress.[/li][li]76 percent said they disapproved of the job Obama was doing on the economy.[/li][li]48 percent said they blamed everyone collectively in Washington, rather than finger just Obama, former President George W. Bush, or Republicans in Congress.[/li][/ul]

Those are overwhelmingly bad numbers, coming directly from the people who create 70% of all jobs in America. The President says jobs is now his #1 focus, yet the opinions of the people who are actually going to create those jobs (or not) should be completely ignored?

Good luck with that job creation.

Incidentally, 70% of small businesses surveyed said they won’t be hiring this year. Another 9% said they plan to lay off more employees. You don’t think that’s perhaps a little problem for Obama’s job creation agenda?

Why do you think the Chamber of Commerce is anti-Washington? It’s because the Chamber represents small business. They’re the ones who are routinely and continually screwed over by Washington policy that protects big business from competition. They’re the ones who will take the brunt of the Obama health care laws - big businesses already have health care plans, or they’ve managed to wrangle waivers. When big corporations lobby Congress for tax breaks, they’re rarely the kind that benefit small businesses. Your local independent grocery store isn’t exactly parking its profits with its overseas offices, is it?

It’s no surprise at all that the largest organization of small businesses would be opposed to the Obama administration’s policies, while companies like GE and GM are cheerleaders for the administration (while they move jobs offshore). It rather makes my point about crony capitalism.

But I do note a bit of slipperiness there. For instance, the TL:DR précis of the report says:

So you’re picking nits about wording, while ignoring the fact that the survey of actual small business owners finds they are overwhelmingly opposed to the ways in which the government claims to be helping business.

Keep whistling past that graveyard.

Not quite the same thing, now is it, Sam? What they said was they wanted more certainty, and one can surely understand that. But to claim that what they were saying by “wanting more certainty” was that this uncertainty was a crushing burden, “the largest impediment for growth in their businesses”…? What? Huh?

I tried going to the text of the full survey, but it’s offline. So I don’t know if the headline doesn’t reflect the actual content, or whether it was taken from another part of the survey not published in the summary outline of the article. In any event, the other answers that are published make it pretty clear that small businesses think that Obama administration policies and rhetoric are actively hurting their ability to grow their businesses and hire people. And you’re just going to dismiss that with a wave of your hand because the copywriter may have gotten the title slightly wrong?

Mind if we call you “Stretch”?

Yeah, actually I do, since it implies that I’m attempting to obfuscate or lie. I quoted the headline of the article precisely. And while the questions they decided to show don’t exactly match the headline, we don’t know if they left out that question. And in any event the answers to the questions they do show illustrate just how hostile the small business community is to the administration’s policies. I think we can take that as an indication that they find this to be a severe problem.

(Some of us actually read cites, Sam. Be warned.)

Well, that’s a relief.

[elucidator]

Is it your contention that the Chamber is not a partisan institution? That they do not reflect a distinct and pervasive Republican orientation? Shouldn’t we be a bit more skeptical when offered surveys and such from such clearly partisan sources?

Did you, by any chance, drill down, baby?

http://www.uschambersmallbusinessnation.com/docs/US-Chamber-of-Commerce-Summit-Presentation-from-Harris-Interactive.pdf

Under “methodology”. (I’m an expert on this, being raised a Methodist…)

…Respondents: National sample of 1409 Small Business Owners and Executives (“small business owners”) representing both U.S. Chamber of Commerce members and non-members…

Now, its pretty much a given that the majority of the Chambers members have a dim view of Obama, as it is a given that the majority of poster at Freep gave such a view. Now, we are told that both members and non-members were surveyed, and I suppose we are to take assurance in that. But given that members are sure to be a lot easier to contact, and presumably a lot more inclined to cooperate, we already have good reason to wonder if this viewpoint isn’t inherently skewed. Odd they made no mention of the proportions of members surveyed to non-members. Wonder why.

But the viewpoint of *members *was virtually assured, don’t you think? Kind of skews the results?

But, at least, Sam, at the very least, if you are offering us citation from a source you know is slanted and partial, might you at least give a nod to our intelligence and cop to it? I do, if I bring you something from Daily Kos or ThinkProgress, I usually ackowledge their left of center leanings.

At least that much, Sam.

[Sam_Stone]

Oh, come on! Again, you’re switching cause and effect. Small businesses get screwed by Washington. Small business owners then disapprove of Washington’s policies. You declare that information irrelevant because those people are opposed to Washington.

You did notice that 48% of them blamed Washington generally, not singling out any political party or person, right?

I guarantee you that if Obama was doing things that actually helped these guys, they wouldn’t be opposing him for partisan reasons. After all, Jeff Immelt is supposedly a Republican, but he’s now Obama’s bestest buddy and big toe.

Businessmen look after business first and foremost. If they’re all screaming, you had better listen. But you know what? Even if they were a bunch of biased libertarians, you’d STILL better listen, because they’re the ones who will decide if America creates jobs or not.

[elucidator]

Wait, what subject are we on, now? The justification and/or historical progress of the Chamber of Commerce as a wholly owned subsidiariy of the Republican Party? Or the less than sterling reliability of your citations?

[XT]

I think we are on the handwaving part of the thread now, based on your current post. Though we might have moved on to the content free snark phase, considering my own post here. It’s hard to really tell…

-XT

[gonzomax]

Who cares if spoiled execs have jets? The problem is they think they should get tax breaks for them. Why is that a good idea? They are rich and corporate profits are enormous. The companies are sitting on trillions. No they should not get tax breaks.

[Dick_Dastardly]

@Shodan

You need to be more careful to make statements that are un-falsifiable instead of false.
Cite.

A V-Shaped Boom Is Coming.

A viable “V” shaped recovery in the economy and markets has now become the accepted view.

Let me guess - No True Scotsman believed there would be a V-shaped recovery.

Regards,
Shodan

These people are all Wall Street employees or pundits whose job it is to shill for the market. Larry kudlow, a free market supply-sider Reagan-worshipper, especially has a track record of being consistently wrong about everything. He’s famous for claiming that the Bush boom was in full swing and there was no recession right in the middle of the 2008 meltdown. You need to find some actual lefties. there probably are one or two Obama supporters out there but my side of the argument, economists like krugman and de Long, were all saying the stimulus was too small to engineer any kind of sustainable recovery.