OR you could get a frikking job so you can pay your bills.
You do realize we have had much higher debt levels, right?
I’ll believe it when I see it. Right now, I half expect him to throw his hat into the Republicans primary.
Why not, Obama’s been doing it for the last two years.
You mean like what we had under Clinton?
Democrats have always been tax and spend, it was the Republicans starting with Reagan that were the folks that wanted to borrow and spend. If you have problems with borrow and spend during tough economic times you must really be pissed off at Reagan, and W for borrowing and spending during prosperous economic times.
BOLDING MINE
I don’t know where you are from but here those terms tend to be mutually exclusive
You mean “manufactured” desperate emergency situation don’t you?
If there is a crisis, it is in medicare and that crisis has been there for years and the Republicans stopped being the grownups in the room on that subject when they pilloried Obama for trying to reach for the lowest hanging fruit in medicare (the 15% Medicare part C overpayment).
Did you snap out of a coma lately? Bush came in with a surplus. He started 2 wars without paying for them, cut taxes primarily for the wealthy, and started a huge and expensive drug giveaway. I am sure you Any part of it? Then Bush, not Obama, started TARP.
IF we default, how fucked will we be? I understand that interest rates would climb, the recession would be double-dip, and the US will turn brown from the massive shit that will hit the massive fan, but how much worse is it than that?
Sam, you have a long history of posting cites that you obviously haven’t read, and drawing conclusions that the authors don’t make. Here’s onefrom this month that I refuted but then you never answered. I also called you out the pit that went 5 pages a year ago.
Let me get this straight, are you saying that the Bush tax rebates of 2001 and 2008 didn’t have a stimulus effect? Correct me if I’m wrong, but were not both of these stimulus attempts along with Obama’s classic supply side levers?
At least we agree that TARP was okay in that it kept the international banking system working and prevented runs on all the major US banks that would have happened within a matter of days.
It is NOT a fringe belief. This has nothing to do with Austrian theory. Hell, even Paul Krugman admits the stimulus didn’t work - he just doesn’t think it was big enough. But the fact is, all the empirical evidence that’s shown up to date (as opposed to the rehashed CBO model projections the left keeps touting) fails to find an impact from the stimulus anywhere near what was promised. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it.
You’ve been active in the threads where I posted links and quotes from a number of peer-reviewed papers.
What, because you said so? Provide a cite, please. And I’m not talking about another Keynesian model projection. Some hard facts would be nice. There’s plenty of evidence to gather now. You can look at states that received more stimulus than others, and see if their economic stats improved commensurately. You can look at specific stimulus programs and see how they fared. You can look at other attempts to stimulate the economy on the same principles, such as ‘Cash For Clunkers’ or the mortgage rebate program, and see if they had the effects their proponents promised.
Come back with evidence, not just a rehash of the same talking point that the stimulus averted a ‘melt-down’. As I already pointed out, the economy was out of recession before the stimulus money even made it into the economy. That’s not a ‘melt-down’.
No, this was me reading a whole lot of material from actual economists in major institutions.
First, I never mentioned that prediction. But since you did, I’ll point out that the only ‘refutation’ of the fact that the actual employment numbers never came close to what was promised is simply a statement that ‘things were worse than was thought’, and the justification for that statement is… that unemployment wound up being higher than predicted with the stimulus. That’s circular reasoning.
Also, I’m trying to find a paper that I read last year, and when I do I’ll post it - the paper took a look at exactly that notion, and concluded that yes, the unemployment situation was somewhat worse than was originally predicted, but even when taking that into account the stimulus did not create nearly as many jobs as was promised.
So you admit the stimulus didn’t do what the Democrats claimed it would do when passed?
Default? All they had to do was hold the line on their own growth and perhaps claw back public sector salaries by a few points in most cases. And even if they had to lay off people, it’s not at all clear that that would have resulted in more net job losses than the losses that occurred in the private sector due to stimulus borrowing and crowding out.
It doesn’t matter how large the drop was - if you think there is low aggregate demand due to a recession, then a Keynesian analysis would tell you that if you pump money into the economy, it will stimulate demand and the economy will improve. How much it improves would then depend on how much of it can be applied to truly idle resources and how big the stimulus is relative to the size of the drop in demand. But you should see an effect regardless.
No, I think it would have been far better to let the economy sort itself out, and to recognize that the root problem that led to the recession was a burst asset bubble leading to public and private balance sheets that were out of whack, and that nothing was going to fix the economy overnight. I would have focused on getting the government’s balance sheets corrected given the new reality of lower revenue, and I would have promoted stabilization policies such as a freeze on expensive regulations.
That wasn’t going to happen. The stimulus wasn’t that large, and a good chunk of it was actually used to increase the salaries of public workers - a truly perverse result.
So you keep saying. Perhaps you can link to some papers that use actual empirical evidence to show that the stimulus succeeded? I’m not talking about papers that regurgitate the same Keynesian models, but ones that actually studied the results.
I’m not saying the stimulus failed to create any jobs. I think the jury is still out on whether there was actual net job creation due to ARRA. If you pump a trillion dollars into the economy you’re bound to create a job or two. But for the stimulus to ‘succeed’, it had to A) prevent a much bigger problem, or B) have the kind of Keynesian multipliers that would make it close to being GDP neutral after all shakes out in the wash.
Don’t forget that before the stimulus even passed the CBO admitted that at the 10-year mark it would cost the economy about .9% in GDP due to interest carrying costs eventually overwhelming the gains from jobs saved during the recession. And that was with the assumption that the stimulus would do what its proponents said it would do.
If the stimulus had only half the positive effect, or the multipliers were less than one, then in the long run the stimulus will wreak significant damage on the U.S. economy. And I think that’s exactly what has happened.
Penicillin is obviously no good. We used it to treat a raging infection. We used half the recommended dose, but the infection came back, which is not what we were promised. Clearly, the medicine is no good and the doctor is a liar.
He did, fueled by a NASDAQ bubble that soon collapsed.
Tax cuts? They benefited everyone who pays taxes; obviously, if you make more, you pay more, so you’d benefit more. But keep that class warfare drum a beatin’.
(If the Bush Tax Cuts are SOOOO BAD, then why hasn’t your boy proposed repealing them for everyone - so far, it’s just been for those making over $250k, which will add next to nothing to tax receipts - something like $33b according to another thread on these lefty boards.
Or did you just snap out of a coma lately? 
)
As conservatives love to point out, half the households in the nation pay no income tax. So tell us again who benefits from tax cuts?
Productive members of society?
So if someone pays no income tax, they are not a productive member of society?
Now who is waging class warfare?
gonzo
It was a great line, though
In all seriousness, this is what you get when half of the country kicks in nothing in the form of income tax, they skate by and free-ride on those who take risks and work hard. The class dichotomy is great for the Dems, since they get well by dividing and pitting interest group against interest group (as well as creating a dependency class, everyone from welfare to government loans to unions). But not to digress too much…
If the Dems had ever proposed repealing all of the tax cuts, when they had absolute power, then maybe you’d have a point. But they haven’t even done that. So your problem is with the Democratic Party, and their complete lack of balls. Your messiah caved on the Bush tax cuts, he caves on Gitmo, he caves on pretty much everything except Obamacare.
Not that 90% of this board won’t vote for him again… to do otherwise would be racist.
So a single mom with two kids, working two minimum wage jobs is skating by, taking no risks and not working hard? She pays no income tax, only payroll taxes, yet her 60 hour weeks don’t meet your standard of hard work?