In Florida, at least, nobody is “forcing” anything on us; Governor Crist (R) is breaking party ranks and begging Congress to pass the bill. I’ve heard it’s the same way in many Pub-controlled states.
Perhaps you can explain it, nonetheless. In what way does training 50-year-olds for jobs that are unavailble provide a immediate benefit to the economy?
Republican governors started feeling public pressure. Charlie Crist was always in favor of the stimulus. After watching the stimulus fight, the GOP doesn’t seem to have room for moderates like Crist. The ideological Republican governors who opposed the bill always wanted the money and will gladly take it now that they have no choice.
Sheesh.
Just as a launching point, consider my brief, casual summary here – with jayjay’s correction, of course.
To summarize:
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Gregg asks Obama (not the other way around) for the appointment as Commerce Secretary (perhaps because he wanted to be able to fulfill his wish of a watered-down census in the first place?)
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Obama grants Gregg his wish.
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Individuals and groups who are aware of Gregg’s contempt for a census that includes everyone (such as those listed by Boyo Jim), including illegal immigrants, something that is anathema to most Republican leaders, come forth with their deep concerns.
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When Obama learns from those groups of Gregg’s preference for an unfairly limited census – something Gregg has fought for in the past – the President agrees to move control of the census out from under Gregg’s jurisdiction. Obama does this out his zeal for bipartisanship, because he still wanted Gregg as his Commerce Secretary. Moving the census to another department would alllow Obama to get his nomination approved by the Senate Democrats who would otherwise vote against him based on Gregg’s hostility to the census.
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When Gregg learns that one key area which he apparently wanted to control – the census – is now out of the Commerce Secretary’s jurisdiction (probably along with other reasons), he decides he doesn’t want the job anymore and so he withdraws his nomination.
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Some on the SDMB insist that there was something suspicious and/or nefarious involved!
Frank, thanks for an interesting question.
There’s a lovely Latin phrase, “ceteris paribus”, which applies to questions like these. Literally it means “other things being equal”. It is usually used in a more general sense, however, to mean something like “if we make the reasonable assumptions.”
In this case, the reasonable assumption would be that we would train people for jobs that are available, not to repair rovers on the Moon or build autos in Detroit. Currently, for example, there is a nationwide shortage of nurses, home health care aides, dental assistants, nurses aides, and medical professionals in general. With the graying of the American population, we know that demand will only increase.
We know what jobs are not filled right now, today. It’s not just medical professionals. Both governments and businesses develop statistics on these things. Train people for those jobs. A number of these jobs are either semi-skilled or require minimal training, while others require years of study. We can assist in both. For the technical jobs, offer “final-year scholarships” for people in their last year of study for degrees in network system analysis, nursing management, software engineering, or whatever we see that we need. Identify the holes and fill them, stop importing people from other countries on technical work visas. For the non-technical jobs like home health care aide, network support technician, or nurses aide, often three months to a year of training is more than adequate for entry level positions.
In my experience, practical job-related education is never wasted. It lasts a lifetime. The more people who know how to do more than one job, the better our economy will function. Where I work, we encourage (and spend money on) cross-training in our business among our own employees. We are willing to spend money to do it because of the obvious benefits to the company. Three people missing from work today? No problem. Too much of this kind of work, not enough of that kind of work? No problem. The same is true on a larger scale in the national economy.
Thats how I see job-related training as providing both a short term and a long term benefit to the economy. Ideally, of course, we would like all of the stimulus to have both short- and long-term benefit. Failing that, I’d say short term at a minimum … but not under the rubric of “any spending gives a short term benefit”. I want something that translates into more people working in the next couple years, not at government jobs, but at regular jobs.
:rolleyes: Education was one of the few sectors in our economy that actually added jobs over the last year. This is a bailout and a pet project–it’s pork. I keep forgetting though, so thanks for the reminder: any dollar in the stimulus bill is good on account of it’s going to be spent. There is no bad stimulus plan apparently. Here’s another :rolleyes: for ya, free of charge.
And the word for the day is “counter-intuitive”. The conservative mindset has an intuitive sense of spending, that it is bad, because it is taxes, etc., you know the drill. If pressed to the limit, that mindset will grudgingly accept spending if it can be proven beyond a shadow of doubt that the spending is necessary, productive, and cannot fail to produce excellent results.
Sadly, no. We don’t have the options. Keynes once famously remarked that under certain desperate and trying circumstances, it actually makes sense to pay someone to dig a hole and fill it in again. This is an example of economic theory guaranteed to make the veins throb in a conservative forehead. Not merely counter-intuitive, but counter-intuitive thrombosis.
Is it a gamble? Hugh Betcha! But a gamble makes sense when the payoff is high enough, or the consequences dire enough.
There is no possibility, none whatever, that we can afford the time to comb through every project and assure to the nth degree that the spending is justifiable and prudent. We are *going *to waste some money. You’re going to put out a raging four-alarm fire, you’re going to waste some water. The worst scenario is not wasting money, the worst scenario is not spending enough money for the present emergency, which will have the effect of wasting *all *of the money we do spend.
The “housing boom” and the (God help us!) “ownership society” is a disaster, a disaster that ran in tandem with George and Don’s Excellent Military Adventure. They are interlocking catastrophes, mutually reinforcing. Whenever naysayers grumbled darkly about the effect all this military spending (borrowed spending, mind you!) would have on our economy, the Bushiviks would start talking in glowing terms about the wonderful housing market, they used a disastrous bubble to support a disastrous adventure, they deployed smallpox to combat cholera.
And here we are.
Basic Keynesian economics, Stratocaster: “There are times when it makes sense for the government to pay people to dig holes and fill them up again.” (Quoted from memory.) This is one of those times.
Paull Begala sticks it to Governor Mark Sanford quite neatly in this cnn.com evisceration of his hypocrisy and utter lack of practical alternatives:
There’s more, equally delicious and nutritious. As for me? I expect Governor Sanford to line up at the trough, elbowing his way to the front, while loudly braying that he’s being forced, forced to go against his deepseated principles.
Why? Because you say so? Because Nancy Pelosi does? Because Obama says we’re in mortal peril with every second that goes buy without this bill passed? So let’s just accept an endless series of “filled in holes” 5 years from now, with $800B in debt to show for it. That’s a great idea.
I dismiss out of hand the notion that almost $800B in spending requires no more discussion or analysis–none beyond the few weeks and almost zero debate it’s taken to construct it–when this level of spending sets up debt that my son will be paying off long after I’m dead, sets a standard for spending / roles that absolutely has no place in the government, and where there is nothing, nothing, to lead anyone to believe that any of the specific targets for dollars, at the amounts set, will actually achieve the intended effect.
What, exactly, would have occurred if we spent another month debating the individual expenditures in this bill? Given the long-term impact of this atrocious bill, a month more of “mortal peril” while we examined the bill and let the public know what was really embedded in this godawful mess was more than warranted. Why did a vote have to take place only a few hours after the bill was made available? Who in the world could possibly describe that as transparency, as real debate? The public deserves way better, and the fact that most of the people have been set into a fearful panic where they’d accept ANYTHING from that fraternity of idiots in Washington doesn’t make this any less shameful.
I am so fucking sick of any retort that takes the form of, “But we have to do something, and now!” No, we don’t! “Anything” is not a good enough reason to spend money. It’s just not. Let’s start by eliminating all those options that may actually do more harm than good. If we’re not certain which category a given bill belongs in, let’s confirm first, how’s about that for a simple hurdle?
I thought the stimulus package was being sold very much based on the idea that infrastructure in the US had been neglected for the last few years.
The logic as I understood is was that we would borrow and spend a huge amount. This would stimulate the economy and end the recession. Then the increased productivity would allow us to pay off the debt with future taxes. Now it is being asserted (apparently) that there is no need to worry about future productivity, and spending on anything at all is a Good Thing.
How this is believed in light of Japan’s experience is not clear. They did what Obama and the Dems are proposing to do, and have not avoided the same recession as we encountered.
Regards,
Shodan
In the end, only 17% of the spending in this bill goes to ‘infrastructure’. And a lot of that ‘infrastructure’ is actually government buildings, and not things like roads and power grids.
The biggest recipients of this bill will be government workers, who are already over-paid, have better than average benefits and job security. The next biggest beneficiaries will be union employees, since so much spending that would have been in the private sector will now be taken on by the government, which has regulations which compel it to pay union wages on jobs.
A lot of this money just can’t be justified as a ‘stimulus’, because no one knows how to spend the money quickly, and because the recipients are already in fields that have close to full employment, so the money will simply crowd out private investment.
For an example of these types of projects:
$2 billion to develop advanced batteries for hybrid cars
$3.4 billion for fossil energy research
$5.5 billion for “green” federal buildings
$200 million to design and furnish Department of Homeland Security headquarters
$98 million earmarked for a polar icebreaker
$25 million for the Smithsonian Institution
$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
$500 million earmarked for the SSA National Computer Center in Maryland
$8 billion for high-speed railways
$1.3 billion for Amtrak
8 billion for high-speed railways. What in hell is that doing in a stimulus package? Does anyone believe that a nickel of that money will make it into the economy in any reasonably near future timeframe? There are NO high-speed rail projects that are anywhere near ‘shovel ready’.
And almost all the big contractors and suppliers in that industry are overseas. The U.S. has very few companies that do any work at all in high speed rail. You can’t have a fiscal multiplier if your money goes overseas.
8 billion dollars is a hell of a lot of money. That’s half of NASA’s entire budget.
That’s exactly the kind of project that should have been debated through a normal appropriations process. It’s a huge investment, a huge change in infrastructure, there is much disagreement on it, and it can’t be done quickly anyway. The only reason it’s in this bill is because the Democrats used the fig leaf of a ‘crisis’ to ram through a pet project that they know can’t survive public scrutiny through the normal legislative process. It’s the exactly opposite of the kind of transparency Obama was promising. It’s frankly disgusting.
If, as you say, transparency is absent, how the heck did you find out? But, that said, I share your alarm that so much of this money will be paid to unionized workers, which will clearly go to subsidize cigar-chomping labor bosses rather than the clear-eyed and noble entrepreneur so dear to your heart. Union workers? Oh, my. Dreadful.
But I do admire a bit of deftly worded prose. For instance, “For an example of these types of projects…”. That’s nicely done. You imply, but do not state, that these are but examples, that you have a list as long as your arm, but will spare us an explicit rendering of all such projects, our attention span being what it isn’t. Thus, you can give us ten and imply a hundred, without exposing yourself to any direct contradiction. Neatly done.
This is buttressed and supported by a number of bald statements without so much as a hint of citation. Are we to take it, then, that these statements are matters of opinion? Clearly, whether or not “government workers” are “overpaid” is open to considerable question. Are *all *government workers overpaid? Or just unionized gov workers? Firemen, policemen, postal workers, all of that lot? Rather a broad brush, don’t you think?
Now, mind you, I have no objection to statements of opinion, all well and good. But mightn’t you give us the polite IMHO, as a thoughtful nod to the disparity of such opinion?
Further instances:
Followed on by:
And
Scoundrels! Your acute perception of their motives is breathtaking in its clarity. They must shiver in their beds knowing that your gimlet eye can penetrate their darkest secrets, that they are so transparent… Oh, wait, no, they’re not transparent at all, are they?
So, they fooled us, but not you, then? Noted.
No. Appearantly, his answer is to make even more people unemployed. That’ll do the trick. Cause then the Government will want to give back all that budget money.
Anyone see SNL last weekend?
I didn’t see a single thing of substance in this post. Just a lot of snarky commentary. This is par for the course for you. This is Great Debates. You are supposed to debate, and not just drive by and take snide potshots at people you don’t like. You need to change your schtick.
Yes, many of us believe that that money will make it into the economy in a near future timeframe.
The costs for high speed rail will be huge (the northeast corridor one is expected to cost about $32 billion all told and California’s $40 billion) and indeed none are at the ready to build out phase; the money instead will immediately fund all the intellectual property workers who do things like the designing of the system, the surveying for the system, the architecture, etc. Yeah White Collars put money back in the economy too.
You are correct that currently America is not producing much of the equipment for high speed rail - but that is a correctable deficit.
So investing in high speed rail gets both jobs right now (in design, planning, architecture, etc.), stimulates American industry to be competitive again in an emerging high tech sector, and promises increases in long term productivity later by reducing travel time and road traffic density and prepares us later to meet any future CO2 reduction goals in any future international climate agreements that may be made. The perfect item for a stimulus: one that both has immediate effects on jobs and longer term effects on productivity. This is the one you complain about?
Yup, and in Great Debates we like to see cites.
Cite?
Cite?
Cite?
DSeid has already made some good points about the immediate usefulness of HSR funding; I’ll just point out that the bill as passed includes $9.3 billion for high-speed rail and other intercity rail. So it’s not as though existing rail systems can’t get some immediate benefit from this money even if they don’t involve HSR.
Oh Sam, you also made this claim:
Well if you think $8 billion is so much, why are the $27.5 billion for highways, $8.4 billion for mass transit, $11 billion for the electrical grid, another $6 billion for loan guarantees for other electrical production and grid improvements (including renewables) so unimpressive?
Tax cuts were $286 billion, $51 billion to the states, $311 billion in appropriations. All together of that $311 billion, $120 billion is for infrastructure (38.6%, not 17% as you claim) and maybe adding it all up and including some things that scarcely should count as “government buildings” (like public housing), maybe some 12 - 13% of that goes to “government buildings” ($4.5 billion for increasing government buildings energy efficiencies, 3.1 for public and tribal land buildings, 1.2 for VA hospitals, 4 for public housing, and a few other items) - certainly not “most”.
Who are you? George Will? Where do you get such misinformation?