No, the Republicans always say that the solution is to cut taxes, no matter how much damage it does to the country.
The GOP is wrong about that. You would be better off putting your trust in people who use reality to base their ideas on.
Seeing as how taxes are at near historic lows, and the strength of the economy has declined as taxes have been cut, how can you defend that assertion?
The Mythbusters once did the myth on a dog bringing brandy to people who are freezing – the brandy was supposed to warm you up.
They tried it. The brandy made them feel warmer and their limbs more dextrous than before. BUT, this was at the expense of diverting their warm blood to the surface and extremities of their body, causing it to cool faster. For the sake of a temporary and subjectively “better” state, in reality, they’d just be bringing on their own death faster.
When Obama first got into office, he proposed and got an $800 billion stimulus package passed. Republicans voted against it, based on the argument that we were already on unsteady fiscal footing and between that and as soon as people realized that the $800 billion wasn’t free money, just something they’d be charged for again in a year or two, it would just end up causing a double dip in the economy – but this time with the government an extra $800 billion in debt.
Regardless of whether you believe that the Republicans made their prediction into a reality via advertising the fact to the general public, or if it would have happened itself, the point remains that they were indeed correct. You can complain all you want about how they should have been nice and mislead the public about basic math, but that’s silly.
It’s like the joke about the physicist trying to calculate something to do with a cow and he says, “Now we assume the cow is a perfect sphere in a vacuum…” Policy has to be made based on reality. If the reality is that there is a Republican party and they’re going to make it known publicly that you’re just trying to buy your way out of problems, rather than deal with the fundamental issues or let nature take its course, then that’s reality. Passing legislation that ignores this because it’s the “right thing to do for America” is (for lack of a better word) idiotic. It might be true if it was a perfect sphere in a vacuum, but it isn’t. It has to work in the real world.
If the whole of the economy stinks because a majority of the population is worried about the financial stability of the government’s budget, going on a splurge to raise employment temporarily doesn’t really sound like a good idea. You can argue all you want that Republicans just want to be evil to the poor or whatever. I could tell you that you’re foolish to believe that, but I don’t really need to because it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, trying to pass legislation which will heap on debt will make the economy worse, either because of the added debt or because the Republicans drumming up the fact of the added debt. Making things worse is not a good thing. Thus, killing the bill was a good thing.
That’s a whole lot of words just to say “we don’t have a better idea.”
Of course. It gets made up for when times are better and people can afford to pay more in taxes.
I find it interesting that you’re not commenting on what a good idea it was for the Bush administration to both cut taxes and increase spending for two foreign wars. Did you not believe that would have to be paid for someday?
I love conservatives’ logic. 98% of dems support a bill and 100% of pubs oppose it, but it’s the dems fault it didn’t pass.
You and your reality based nonsense, we have no need for that anymore.
No, one of the reasons we’ve had a double dip in the economy is because the Republicans are trying to create as large an economic disaster as possible. They are actively working against the welfare of the country because they want Obama to be seen as a failure, and because they want the wealthy to be as powerful as possible.
And in the real world the Republican party hates Obama, and is irrational, bigoted, ruthless, and power hungry. Obama’s mistake was that he compromised with them again and again, which he should never have done. The result being that now there isn’t much he can do, about anything. Assuming he had the spine to actually try.
The economy stinks because so many people have no jobs or low paying ones. And the way to fix the government’s finances is to raise taxes on the wealthy and the corporations; do you really think that the Republicans are going to go along with that?
Bush was a moron who, by all accounts, thought the wars would be over in a couple of weeks.
I’m not a Republican. I’m just pointing out that accusing Republicans of evil is silly and missing the larger issue.
[mr. burns] Eeehxcellent! 
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The larger issue being that a larger stimulus was needed, and then taxes need to go up to pay for it. Taxes should have never been lowered under Bush, and once the wars were underway, they should have been raised. To pay for it. While you may not be a Republican, you’re defending their mantra.
The larger issue is that the evil is in the corporate sector by which both parties are owned but the Dems are not wholly owned. (It might not be an evil thing in and of itself (or it might be, who knows), but it always seems to turn Darth-Sauron-pure evil the moment it pays a lobbyist or a spindoc – or a campaign.)
I’m not a “we”. I’m pointing out the reality of the situation between the Democrats and the Republicans and what it has to do with the economy and the value of the proposal.
Personally, I do have a better idea.
Health care costs twice in the US what it does in every other modern nation in the world. But in terms of actual health, the US performs no better. The doubled amount that we pay goes into giving us more spacious rooms, equipment which is fancier (but doesn’t really pay itself off in terms of how much it extends the life of patients), nice architecture to our hospitals, etc. The extra cost that we pay, which goes into things which are irrelevant to maintaining and prolonging the health of patients, is most probably due to the lack of a health-based market to drive prices. In a single payer nation, medicine and equipment is bought by a single organization which is tasked to budget based upon the quantitative value of those things. In the US, health packages are offered as a perk of employment, with employees having a preference to go to companies with a higher dollar value health package. Over time, this has driven up the amount of money spent in the health market, to its current value.
The US government, via Medicare, Medicaid, and so on is not large enough to act like a single payer and drive costs down to the halved level that they should be. This means that they must pay a competitive price for the American health market.
In total, the Federal Government pays something like $126 to $175 billion more than it should each year. The entire nation (i.e. all health care spending, including private insurance and social programs) pays $900 billion to $1 trillion each year in excess of what is necessary for our continued health.
As I said in my first post, any proposal which you want to make needs to work in the real world. In the real world, Republicans are not going to allow taxes to be raised. This means that spending needs to be cut. The only spending which can be cut is either military or social programs (like health care). Republicans will not allow a single payer health care system to take over everything in the nation.
But also in the real world, cutting spending on anything means putting people out of work. Medical researchers, medical supply manufacturers, etc. will all have their revenue cut by half and, subsequently, have to lay people off. Bringing our soldiers back means putting a bunch of soldiers out of work and looking for jobs.
All you can do at this moment is to start the process rolling for the health care market to fix itself, and hope that it will shift itself to be in line with the rest of the world at a slow enough rate to not hurt us now, but to solve itself before the date comes when US debt flops over to unsustainability (sometime around 2030, I think, though it may have moved forward now). If the general public can be convinced that this is an actual measure to solve the Federal deficit, then that helps today’s economy become more stable and will subsequently lead to more jobs. (And with a favorable outlook from the public on the government’s budgeting, something like a jobs bill is more likely to find approval.)
Further cuts may be made in other places, like a plan for bringing the troops back home, but the key focus needs to be on slow-and-easy. Massive bursts of spending or massive cuts are both liable to frack everything over, even if there weren’t any Republicans in the gears. The important thing at the moment, so far as the public is concerned, is to demonstrate that the government and the financial market are both on solid footing again, and have a plan in place for getting back onto a balanced budget.
Or to say that in fewer words: We need long term solutions, not quick-fixes.
As pointed out, a single payer system isn’t going to happen. But that’s also not necessary; there are nations which use private insurance which pay half of what we do. But they sell directly to the customer, not to corporations to pass on to the customer as a perk. Some variant of such a system would probably be acceptable to Republicans and would, over time – and particularly with some sort of legislation which required advertising to focus on “actual number of years of life by which your life will be prolonged (on average) with this insurance plan” rather than on how nice your doctors are, or whether you’ll have a TV in your hospital room – remove hundreds of billions of wasted money that our nation pays every year that could be better spent paying back our debt or financing new industries.
Democrats don’t want to remove social programs. Republicans don’t want to raise taxes. American health care is such a large percentage of our national expenditure and that cost is provably halvable without reducing quality of care. I don’t think there’s any argument that it’s not the center of any solution.
So your solution is…what, exactly? “Start the process rolling” on healthcare reform?
I can play “point at the particular market inefficiency” with you all day, but that doesn’t solve the unemployment problem.
Three. All the Repubs voted as usual in one brainless bloc .
Back to the issue at hand. The bill was completely unready, a vague statement with no practical value. I’ve also heard a lot of political commenters suggesting the Democrats had little-to-no interest in passing it themselves and just wanted it dead and buried.
Bottom line? This bill was never going anywhere.
How are the Dems not wholly owned?
That’s rubbish. A stimulus only works so long as the public is stupid and kept in the dark.
The whole point of a stimulus is to give people and corporations free money so that they go out and spend a bunch. Companies then see all this inflow of money and (according to theory) assume that this is actually the market picking back up. They hire people back on, and everything is all well again.
That makes several very silly assumptions.
Firstly, it assumes that the people will blithely assume that a stimulus is and will always be a solution, and so spend their money recklessly, instead of putting it into savings or paying off debt. In the real world, if the mass populace hasn’t been convinced that everything which caused the market crash has been fixed, they’re not going to be reckless. A stimulus has to follow legislation and changes in the marketplace which a strong majority believes are genuine fixes. Trying to kick-start the economy back up before then is throwing away money.
Secondly, it assumes that businesses will assume that the money they are receiving is due to the market returning, not due to a temporary, government stimulus that may or may not have any lasting effect. Again, unless they are certain that things have been fixed and that the market is just waiting to come back – possibly needing a stimulus – then they’re not going to start hiring and growing again.
Thirdly, it assumes that people will think that it’s wise for the government to just give away free money to everyone. If they’re not confident in the government to begin with, and the government hasn’t convinced them that all issues which lead to the crash have been squished thoroughly, then if the government goes out throwing money around, it just drives market confidence down further. People are much less likely to return to positive economic behavior than if the government had done nothing.
Fourth, it assumes that the people won’t realize that the instant the market starts to come back, the government is going to have to come back down on them and start taking all that money away again. They’ll horde it rather than spend it just so that they don’t have to worry that they’re the guy caught with his pants down on that day.
Overall, unless you have a very popular government or a very dumb populace, a stimulus is most likely to lead to stagflation. Only in the case where the market has been primed for a comeback, but no one wants to make the first move, does a stimulus make sense. It should not be, and shouldn’t have been, the piece of legislation towards “fixing” the problems of the economy.
Should have explained. This was, remember, a vote to bring the bill up for debate. Failing to get there, and failing to even get your own party all-in on it, is a sign of complete and abject failure. Several Dem Senators have openly stated they wouldn’t vote for the actual bill to be passed, even if they voted for debate.
Edit: And as I have pointed out here… at length… stimulus packages do not have a great deal of historical data to back them up. It’s a nice theory, but in no way has it been demonstrated as a fact. At best, the data is mixed, and an awful lot of evidence suggests they’re temporary boosts. You may be able to cushion a downturn, but not change it with governemnt spending.