One third of the stimulus went into a tax cut. Tax cuts do not create jobs. Therefore much was wasted. But they had to do that to get past the Repub filibuster.
Three major errors in only two sentences! The $1 → $7 figure cannot possible be sensical, since much more than 14% of the economy is consumer spending. We’d have gone “critical” if the 1–>7 were meaningful, like a plutonium bomb. 
But I’m certain ralph124c claims no knowledge of economics, so let’s move on to the bigger misconceptions in Sentence #2.
If your goal is simply consumer spending, what in heaven’s name is wrong with hiring government workers? You Beck-Palinbaggers (or whatever your generic name is now) hate government so much, you seem not to acknowledge that government employees are human Americans also, who spend their paychecks just like everyone else. 
:smack:
Finally, your comments about the stimulus imply that
You are still unaware that the Obama stimulus included the BIGGEST Tax Cut EVER!!!
Can you read that? Can you remember it? The posting codes support even bigger fonts, if that would help.
Yeah, no kidding :eek:
The insourcing initiatives going on are mostly this administration’s payback to the unions who helped get him elected. In almost every case, and I say this with probably more experience in this area than anyone else on this board, the contractor can do it better, faster, cheaper, etc than can the govie. There are a few inherently governmental positions, mostly contracting officers and other procurement/policy types, but for the most part, it’s much more efficient to have contractors do it.
The biggest problem with govies is that they are motivated to avoid risk rather than achieve, they are very difficult to fire or even transfer off a project once it’s done, and they have extremely generous fringe compared to private sector contractors, which is virtually never considered in cost comparisons that this administration likes to make.
Again, private sector far more efficient and effective than public. Simply a matter of incentives. Those of you not familiar with this world probably are skeptical, but trust me, it’s a matter of Conventional Wisdom for those who are in the know (by the way, both govies and contractors feel this way.)
Tax cuts do not create jobs?
This is a joke, right?
Please please please, try to read something other than what you are getting off of Kos and HuffPo. The lefty talking points may sound good in the echo chamber of the SDMB, but all they do is mislead and obfuscate the real story.
If you want to know what CBO really said, read this.
They actually used models to guess on the number of jobs, which they suggest was somewhere between 1.4 and 3.3 million, which includes jobs going from part time to full time.
BTW the new price tag is $814b, not $787b… this money lowered unemployment from somewhere between 0.7% and 1.8%.
Again, this is all based on modeling, not actual proof. So when you criticize opinions… what else do we have to work from? We don’t have the hard numbers, as CBO details, due to problems with reporting (many specific examples were ridiculed on Rush’s show and others, reports of creating jobs far in excess of the population of a specific area, etc).
Oh yeah, one more thing. When you say
You may wish to revise and extend your remarks. From a squishy lefty’s favorite source
No spending increases, just tax cuts, eh?
Hows that tax-cutty thing working out for you on the jobs front?
Of course it’s based on models. As CBO stated itself, it is impossible to know as a fact what unemployment would have been sans stimulus, just like it is impossible to know as a fact whether Al Gore would have invaded Iraq after 9/11. While we cannot know alternate history as a fact, we can use time-tested methods of analysis.
So, I object to your description of CBO’s analysis as “guesses.” Guessing is what you do to pick lottery numbers. Analysis is when you sort through data using people with big brains and come up with informed judgments.
If you want to be consistent, you will have to throw out any claims you have made along the lines that tax cuts stimulate the economy, because any such statement is only a “guess” informed by modeling, and isn’t backed by actual data.
You’re right here. Spending has increased – primarily in the way of national defense, Social Security, and Medicare. By a lot.
Defense spending, 1999-2010: $274, 294, 304, 348, 404, 455, 495, 521, 551, 616, 661, 719
Social Security, 1999-2010: $390, 409, 432, 455, 474, 495, 523, 548, 586, 617, 682, 721
Medicare, 1999-2010: $190, 197, 217, 230, 249, 269, 298, 329, 375, 390, 430, 457
So, when Federal spending went up by $2 trillion from 1999-2010, $445 billion of that is due to defense spending, $331 billion is from Social Security, and $267 billion is from Medicare. The rest of government hasn’t changed that much.
So, if fiscal “conservatives” want to cut the budget, why should the defense budget be immune from belt-tightening? How do fiscal “conservatives” reconcile cutting Medicare without denying health care to seniors? Why don’t fiscal “conservatives” level with older Americans in their Pledge to America that they want to cut Social Security benefits because government spending is out of hand?
Here’s what happened to the unemployment rate after Ronald Reagan made his 1981 Reagan Tax Cut, the then biggest tax cut in history, marked on the graph as ERTA (economic recovery tax act 1981) and what happened to it after one of Reagan’s Reagan Tax Increases, this one being TEFRA, the biggest single peaetime tax increase in history :
You can look at the Bush 2001/3 tax cuts too. America basically went wight years without creating a job despite Bush inflating the biggest asset bubble in history. The tax raiser Clinton created 20 million.
Here is a bit less deceptive chart that tracks unemployment from 1970 through 2007.
-XT
Raven, please cite where I’ve said that defense, medicare, etc spending is off the table.
Everything’s on the table. Everything.
As for tax cuts creating jobs, I was going to try to post some cites that prove it, but there are so many out there both for and against the argument that it is probably pointless. Looking back historically only makes sense if you assume that tax cuts were the only thing that changed, and everything else stayed the same, from immigration/pop growth to oil prices to interest rates. Obviously that isn’t the case. Much like with the stim, we have to try to figure out what would have happened had certain things not occurred, an impossible task (as Raven pointed out, would Gore have gone into Iraq? Who knows? Maybe if they had hot massage therapists there…)
Just using logic and deductive reasoning, it seems obvious to me that the more money put into the private sector, the more capital infused there, then the easier it is to generate economic activity, which roughly translates to more jobs than we otherwise would have had.
If this doesn’t seem obvious to you, then feel free to ignore this.
And any evidence to the contrary, rather than disproving the “tax cuts = jobs” theory, will no doubt reflect that taxes simply weren’t cut enough.
Kinda like that theory about the stimulus holding unemployment below 8%. We now have two competing theories. Either the government did not spend enough or the recession was worse than anybody thought.
True, that’s an argument that is available. As I’m sure you’ll agree, as a reasonable person, that Krugman’s et al argument that "The stimulus was great, created all these jobs, but it just wasn’t big enough.
Of course, he’s a lefty so he must be correct. :rolleyes:
So you want to cut defense, Medicaid and Social Security. Got it. Could you please do your best to get that message out to senior citizens before the November elections?
Does that also mean you will oppose this plan, which says nothing about cutting defense, nothing about cutting Medicare, and nothing about cutting Social Security? It just seems slightly deceptive to call for deep spending cuts, but avoid actually saying that the cuts will effect the most obvious places where spending has grown. Don’t you agree?
I’m not sure if you think I’m a Republican, but the tone of your post seems to imply that I am. I’m not. Nor am I a Tea Party member (or if you are one of the kids on this board, a ‘teabagger’).
At the end of the day, we can’t afford the government we have, based on current tax rates and economic growth projections. We have to downsize it. Mostof America thinks this would be a good idea. Thats why Dems are running from their agenda and achievements of the past year, in most districts. Not that they will avoid an asskicking, but maybe it will be tempered if they can pretend that they are Republicans for awhile.
I would include defense, domestic spending, and yes entitlement spending. This is the main reason the healthcare law was bad (and hopefully will be overturned); it used up all of our entitlement reforms to pay for itself, when we needed those savings for other purposes (like eliminating the deficit).
That’s an appeal to ignorance. I keep hearing people say this, and yet they offer no studies to show this. The examples I know of: Post Office v Fed Ex and Army v Blackwater, Cal v Stanford (tuition), UK’s NHS v US’s for profit system, suggest the opposite. What you have done is referred to the economic dogma. Is it perhaps the case that sometimes you can have higher quality and/or less expensive service funded by the government and sometimes not? How about private currencies? etc. If private is so superior, why has the US dollar been the world currency for the past 70 years? Your analysis suggests that corporate bonds would be king.
Economists were saying at the time that the stimulus wouldn’t be big enough. We were trying to close a $1.2 trillion a year hole in output and a liquidity trap with a net government stimulus of at best a couple of hundred billion* a year. Clearly not enough.
In Asian countries that also enacted stimulus programmes there’s no debate over whether they were successful :
Unlike in the west, there is little debate in Asia about how well the stimulus worked. It has been spectacular. Asian output is well above pre-crisis levels. HSBC is predicting growth for Asia ex-Japan of 8.6 per cent this year. Rather than contemplating more stimulus, authorities are trying to cool things down. Banks have been raising interest rates for months. China and others have introduced measures to take the heat out of the housing market. Fears about unemployment have given way to concerns about labour shortages and spiralling wage demands. Thus the question in most of Asia is not whether to remove stimulus, but how fast. Asia is in orthodox territory, balancing well-trodden trade-offs between growth and inflation.
*The $800 billion stimulus package was spread over a couple of years at least. 40% of it was tax cuts and another chunk was federal aid to states to prevent layoffs of firefighters, teachers etc. due to collapsing state revenues. That leaves very little in the way of actual net stimulus and coupled with the inability to cut interest rates any further means the stimulus was nowhere near big enough.
Right on schedule…
Here is an interesting op/ed in the Washington Times about stimulus as a percent of GDP. I think it complements your link about the Asian stimulus.
This is a reasonable response, but I’m not talking about financial/investment vehicles. Obviously the full faith and credit of the country, which isn’t likely to pull a Greece, is a bit more of a safer haven than some for-profit enterprise (which has to live under the regulatory edicts of government and of course the threat of constant competition - assuming limited barriers to entry). A more apt analogy would be to compare the health of an entire industry against gov. But again, still a false comparison.
It’s all about incentives. Government/public sector workers have one set, private sector another. If you’re not in the industry, you’ll have to trust me on this. No study that I know of has been done that actually makes a true comparison. If you want a false comparison, go read up on A 76 competitions.
Or, to put it another way, to a Govie, *work *is someplace you go. To a contractor, *work *is something you do.