How will the Republican idea of cutting all spending, not stimulating to create jobs, and not fixing the infrastructure, fix the economy? The best they offer is stagnation. The worst is crippling the job market even more.
The stupid argument that the government does not create jobs should embarrass them. The Dept. Of Homeland Security has over 200,000 employees. How the hell is that not job creation ?
Whereas the Dems are only 95% brainless bloc and 5% traitors.
You’re assuming there is a short term solution for it, which doesn’t just make things worse in the long run.
The Federal Government could just go and make everyone a government employee. But everyone would know that as soon as things started to look rosy, they’d all just be laid off again because the Federal Government didn’t have any actual use. At the end of the day, the unemployment rate would be the same, but the US government would be further in debt for having hired people to sit on their asses all day for X amount of time.
The first step has to be to make the populace believe that the economy is on a firm footing. Jobs may or may not follow that, I can make no guarantee on that front; you may need to do something more after that point to start the creation of new jobs if it isn’t enough. But nothing you try to do will have any lasting effect if you haven’t done that first thing.
What’s your explanation for how the Depression ended?
Okay, this is getting annoying.
“The first step has to be to make the populace believe that the economy is on a firm footing.”
How?
Again, we can play “point out the obvious” forever, but it’s still not a suggestion for how to actually proceed.
Because of the opportunity cost. How many jobs were lost elsewhere because $55 billion per year is being spent on the DHS instead of by the people who earned it? How many jobs were lost because of the TSA playing the obstructive bureaucrat?
You think taxes are too low?? 
The Feds are stealing 20% of Job Creators’ income, which is about 30% too high.
What we need to do, and do it fast, is to reverse this theft. Anyone making more than $400,000 should have the theft-rate dropped to zero, and everyone making more than a million per year should have a 10% reverse-tax tacked on. That would send more money direct to the Job Creators where it’s needed, unlike this so-called Jobs Bill.
Reagan proved deficits don’t matter, but if the natterers insist we need to pay for such a Job Creation stimulus, may I suggest simply starting another war against an evil oil-rich regime? This would please the leftists, assuming they’re sincere, since their ignorant and useless supporters could get jobs in Infantry.
(PS: Yes, I’m joking. Move this to BBQ Pit if you want my sincere views on the inanities I see in this thread.)
A tourniquet is a short-term solution to an urgent problem. Once that urgent problem is addressed, in the short term, the longer solution, stitches and antibiotics, may be applied. The final solution, dressings, bandages and appropriate recovery, is the actual solution. When the patient has a severed artery, the short term solution is not only appropriate, but necessary.
Shifting metaphor: the engine of the economy runs on consumerism, there is no replacement, without consumerism there effectively is no economy. A stimulus will, hopefully, function rather like the starter motor, it does not draw its power from the gasoline (consumerism) but from an immediate but unsustainable source, the battery/solenoid.
The stimulus is not to run the engine, but to start it. Is hope and positive expectation important? Yes, but it isn’t “real” in the sense of being measure and quantified, it isn’t “real” in the sense of being reliable and predictable. Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Now, one more metaphorical leap, and I’m done. Deficits are a sin, to be sure. If, however, the sin enables you to survive long enough to perform the appropriate penance and achieve fiscal Grace (balanced budget, full employment, peasants rejoicing…) then it is a sin to be regarded with tolerant forgiveness.
A stimulus may not be an odds-on bet. But if they odds of winning are five to one against, the bet is one dollar and the payoff is one hundred…borrow a dollar and make the bet. If the first bet fails, borrow another, bet again.
You want to play this game? Fine. Let’s play this game. If 98% of Democrats support a bill yet 2% of Democrats and 100% of Republicans oppose that same bill, then that means that the only manner of bipartisanship in regards to the bill is in opposition to the bill, in which case it can be argued that the 98% of Democrats who voted for the bill are only interested in themselves and what they want, rather than the good of everyone.
…Because, you know, that’s exactly what would be stated around here if the roles were reversed and it was 98% of Republicans voting for a measure with 2% of Republicans and 100% of Democrats opposed. I’ve noticed that, as far as this board is concerned, bipartisanship and all that talk only works one way.
A little tiff called World War II?
I have asked many times for any sort of evidence that government “jobs programs” that reduce taxes or give incentives improve employment at a national level.
It appears that there is no evidence that the programs do anything but improve an incumbent’s chance at re-election.
So with that in mind lets not reduce tax revenues even more, that requires cuts to the one thing that can be shown to cause economic activity, government spending.
Don’t you mean The Jobs Killing Jobs Bill?
Wait. Didn’t Obama give most of that money to the job creators? The rich and wealthy bankers who were supposed to loan out that money to the corporations that were going to make jobs?
Isn’t it obvious that we are still using conservative fiscal policies? Do you think a Republican would have let the banks go under during the financial collapse? They voted for the stimulus as well, but they also have greatly opposed regulation of banks which might prevent such a catastrophe from happening again.
It seems to me that Republicans have a split personality.
If you’re so worried about the job creators, why are you against the bailouts? You think we’d have much job creation if all the largest investment banks went bankrupt? You think the wealthy want their savings to disappear?
If you’re so against bailouts, why are you so adamant about bailing out the wealthy through tax cuts which have so far yielded not yielded anymore jobs?
The belief that jobs are created simply because the wealthy have money is bogus. You also need customers! You don’t think that part of the reason why there are no jobs is that the economy is cyclical?
A business requires customers and customers require jobs. Right now we have a severe lack of customers because there are fewer jobs.
Now we can either let things be continually stagnant or ‘stimulate’ the economy by redistributing wealth. We can do this by taxing the wealthy more and creating more government jobs and work programs.
This way we now have more customers for goods and services and creating jobs in the private sector as a result (customers increase - so do jobs). You can argue that most of the jobs will go to China, but we’re not forcing corporate America to do this. They are choosing not to employ Americans because they want to make larger profits.
Unless you want Americans working at the same wages as a person in China, then there is nothing we can really do to prevent this. Simply cutting taxes is not going to make it any more likely they will create jobs here (as has been evident).
And just for emphasis:
The only jobs we can reliably say will stay in America are jobs created by the American government, not the private sector.
Seems to me that Obama almost certainly just guaranteed his own re-election.
So, essentially, the government borrowing a bunch of money and hiring a bunch of people is what got us out of the Depression?
I’m glad we agree.
I don’t really want to hijack this thread, even if it has largely decended into Pit-hood. So I’ll be very brief.
I recognize that governemnt borrowing did raise GDP, of course. However, it ultimately didn’t create actual growth. The early signs of recover were completely dependant on continued borrowing (which couldn’t go on forever) and could not survive the end of it. You can also point to the wartime economy, in which we certainly had growth, but it was also all totally dependant on continued war. The critical change came in the few years after the war, when America was exporting like crazy. It wasn’t actually until 1949 - with the complete dismantling of the huge government econommic controls and investment - that things recovered to pre-depression levels.
Second, I point out that one data point, even if were suprt-accurate, is useless. There’s always outliers and weird events, and economies are extremely complex beasts that change over time. I can point to numerous other attempts to dfo the same which did not work.
In a side issue, I can ultimately stomach a really Keynesian approach, but I do ask that it also be consistent, and actually follow the advice Keynes himself supported, which did not include high ongoing levels of government borrowing and money-stuffing into the economy. It would be one thing to try a big Keynesian stimulus if were not appraoching dangerous levels of debt, another as we are. But I reccomend we hop to a different thread if you want to continue, though there’s really not much more to say.
The only way Republicans can create jobs in this country is to get rid of minimum wage and make Americans start working for less than $1 an hour to compete with China.
Good luck trying to sell that to the masses.
You can cut taxes and stop spending all you want, but the jobs aren’t coming back.
The only thing we can do realistically is attempt to tax corporations for using Chinese slave labor and create an incentive (tax breaks) when they hire Americans instead.
So your solution for the current unemployment rate is…what? Are you also on the “just cut taxes more” wagon?
You were saying something about a sphere in a vacuum?
I’m willing to bet the “majority of the population” - you know, the ones too busy to answer stupid polls that are quite often written with questions to slant towards the answer the poll taker wants to hear anyway - are more worried about meeting THEIR OWN budget. Whether they’ll be able to CONTINUE to do so. Keeping essential services intact so they can continue living their lives. Than about the federal debt.
ALSO the great debt ceiling debacle was to authorize a means of payment on items previous congresses had already voted to legally purchase. NOT on future spending. So please, everyone, put that canard in the oven and have a nice duck dinner. ---- It was nearly a Constitutional crisis over simply whether to pay the nation’s credit card bills on time.- or pretend it was lost in the mail until another means was found. (unlikely when the Republicans are not willing “to get a 2nd job” - ie raise revenues…) Again in household terms - You already had this big party (unfunded wars) so choosing to stiff the water company (basic social programs, infrastructure, the elderly) in order to pay the electric company (defense, bond holders) is REALLY a sound economic choice?
Again in household, and very real, terms, consider the stimulus program as money spent looking for that 2nd job (newspapers, transportation to interviews, etc) because average working people pay taxes, out of work people don’t. – The Republican answer was? Stay home and hide under the bed until the storm passes? - – yeah, that works! :smack:
If you think I sound like a parent lecturing a child, maybe you need to look in the mirror… even if you have to stand on a chair.
By implementing a plan to get the national budget under control, which would be accepted by both sides, and getting the public to understand why it will work.