The passing of Obama’s stimulus package in the House is almost a win-win for both sides: the Democrats are happy that their efforts to fix the economy passed and that things are finally happening the way they want, while the Republicans can say that they stood up for their economic beliefs, and are confident they can put all the blame on Obama and the Democrats when (as they believe) the bill inevitably fails to do any good and plunges the country into even deeper economic turmoil.
While there’s a thread on the merits of economic stimuli (?) in general, I don’t see anything on this bill in particular. First of all, will it pass the Senate? If it passed the House, I don’t see why not. Secondly, what good, if any, will this thing do, and can it balance the bad?
Here’s something else I thought of: considering how important the economy is to everyone, assuming the bill passes, is it at all possible that this bill (considering the political manipulations that will undoubtedly follow whether it passes or fails, and the effects it’ll have on the economy should it pass) could singlehandedly determine the results of any of the following:
a) the existence of the union.
b) the post-election 2010 Senate balance.
c) the results of the 2012 Presidential election.
To read some of the more, uh, passionate folks on both sides, you’d think so. Any thoughts?
This bill has little or nothing to do with economic stimulus. It is simply a big payback to the democratic party. look at it…$355,000,000 to “combat STDs”!!
It is payback time, rev up the printing presses! Of course, inflation will devour your savings a few years from now…but who cares? The people who passed this will all be comfotably retired!
The national debt is actually about $10.6 trillion (cite).
In answer to the questions of the OP, yes, and no, respectively. We may (or may not) recover from the current recession in the next two years, but an orgy of borrow-and-spend will not be helpful.
Actually health care, such as combating STDs, is an effective means to put money into the economy quickly that both creates jobs immediately and builds future efficiencies by minimizing future costs of disease management.
Listening to NPR a couple of days ago their guest said it depends on how the money is spent. For example. Bush gave a tax cut and everybody got a check. He paid out about 80+ billion. About 12 billion of that actually was spent while the rest went to pay existing bills. That doesn’t put a lot of money back in the economy.
Rebuilding our infrastructure does help. It creates jobs and gets necessary work done. Other than that I’m not sure what the benefit will be. How will this package release credit so people can buy homes and cars and businesses can operate? We’ve already given hundreds of billions to financial giants. What good has it done?
Hmm. Given the answers so far, I wonder if the later questions I thought of in post #2 would be different enough to make a good separate thread? Thoughts, readers/mods?
It appears to me that the tide is swiftly turning against the stimulus package. I think we may see a little more Democratic opposition to it in the Senate than in the House. Public opinion supporting it is now below 50%.
This is one of those things that sounds good in the abstract, when when you start digging into the details you become less enchanted the deeper you dig.
Both of our Senators from New York are Democrats, I wrote Schumer to ask him to oppose it. Senator Gillibrand doesn’t have a contact page up. Maybe I’ll phone tomorrow to register my view.
I really hope this thing is stopped in the Senate.
There you go again - no links. Allow me. A Rasmussen poll shows a bit fewer than 50% for. On the other hand, a poll reported at Huffington here shows support for the package goes up significantly when details are given. The Rasmussen poll seems to be reported by right wing sites, and I haven’t seen the details of the questions.
I’d love to see the results of a poll on the Republicans “plan”.
Personally, I’d just like to see details on both/either plans. All I’ve heard/read so far is a general breakdown of the plan that passed in the House (y’know, ~40% tax cuts, 10-12% infrastructure, etc.), and a statement from Boehner saying that the Republicans introduced one (I saw a quote somewhere that said it was all tax cuts – can that really be true?). I only post 'cuz I figure there’re good odds that someone will be able to readily provide links.
I’m mostly for a stimulus plan, but it depends on what’s actually in it. For instance, as much as I like Rachel Maddow, I was really perturbed to hear her essentially say “any spending is good spending”. That’s not the attitude I want to hear, and after the botched bailout, it worries me.
Oh. My. God. I think it’s way beyond parody-land at this point, and well into the Republican version of See and Say. Except that instead of a cow, there’s tax cuts. And instead of a horse, there’s tax cuts. Instead of anything and everything, there’s tax cuts.
Well, at least it makes the talking points easy to memorize…
