What Would The Anti-Stimulus-ers Have Preferred?

[Ravenman]

As a govie, I know that I could quit my job, get hired by industry, get paid more, work fewer hours, and have less actual work product in my particular field compared to what I do now.

But I like actually producing work that is substantive and somewhat important.

So your pleas to “just trust you” and accede to how you see the world working are falling on deaf ears here.

[Dick_Dastardly]

@yorick73

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.

YOUNG: Killing Keynesianism? - Washington Times

It’s a GOP lobbyist writing in the Moonie Times and claiming that government spending can’t act as a stimulus because it’s too big a chunk of the economy. That’s definitely a new one.There’s probably some lefty somewhere on the internets arguing that private sector spending increases can’t stimulate the economy because the private sector is too big a chunk of the economy.

[Mr_Smashy]

@Ravenman

As a govie, I know that I could quit my job, get hired by industry, get paid more, work fewer hours, and have less actual work product in my particular field compared to what I do now.

But I like actually producing work that is substantive and somewhat important.

So your pleas to “just trust you” and accede to how you see the world working are falling on deaf ears here.

Unless you are an undersecretary or higher, I highly doubt you would work fewer hours as a contractor. How many weekends and nights are you losing by doing proposals (which we do in addition to our ‘day jobs’) these days? If you were re-badged, you probably would get (slightly) better salary, but worse benefits and virtually no job security.

I’m sure you think the work is important, else you’d probably change jobs. And sometimes government jobs are, you’ll have to provide more details if you want a comment on that. There are some govie jobs where the incentives are correct - certain fee-for-service orgs like franchise fund outfits (FEDSIM, GSA, DOI/NBC come to mind). But they operate more like a little business within the government, don’t they? With clients and leads and solution offerings and constant pressure to perform and deliver…

Far too many govies are just there to punch the clock. I see it every day. If you are really a govie, then you know this to be true. Contractors are always worried about their contract, winning the recompete, and they know that they could easily get cut if they can’t deliver real value day after day.

Again, it’s all about the incentives.

[Mozart1220]

@yorick73

@VinylTurnip

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.

I think it is a bit of both.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Mr_Smashy

@Damuri_Ajashi

Well, then you should be glad to knwo that government contracting seems to be where we are cutting spending.

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.

I don’t know which programs you are talking about but the ones I am familiar with are in the tax area and I always thought that privitizing tax collections was a horrible idea (we basically hand over our tax bills to a collection agency and they take their usual cut).

The biggest problem with govies is that they are motivated to avoid risk rather than achieve

I agree with you there. There is no incentive for those guys to excel.

they are very difficult to fire or even transfer off a project once it’s done,

Agreed once again.

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.

Disagree. The comparisons that are made when deciding to insource things include the cost of benefits. That is why you will not see us insourcing the janitorial staff or the security guards any time soon.

Again, private sector far more efficient and effective than public.

Not always. See medicare, tax collection, the military, etc.

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.)

I don’t think bureaucrats feel this way as much as you do. Most bureaucrats I know think that there are good reasons to have the system we do.

[yoyodyne]

@yorick73

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.

Or it spent enough but wasted it on the wrong things.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Mr_Smashy

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.

From the report:

Increased the number of people employed by between
1.4 million and 3.3 million, and
Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by
2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what would
have occurred otherwise (see Table 1). (Increases in
FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time
work or overtime and are thus generally larger than
increases in the number of employed workers).

So the 1.4-3.3 million number did NOT include jobs going part time to full time. You should read more carefully before you start throwing stones. But your point is taken, the site (I don’t remember but I never read KOS or HuffPo, I usually get info from wiki).

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).

Why am I not surprised that you get your information from someone like Rush Limbaugh.

You may wish to revise and extend your remarks.

No spending increases, just tax cuts, eh?

Yes, in the context of what we were talking about, there were not spending increases (not significant ones) or do you really think that the Iraq war spending is what we are arguing here. Well actually on second look, I guess medicare part D and the energy bill were pretty expensive. I’d be OK with repealing those, if we could repeal the iraq war I’d do that too.

The Bush tax cuts cost us approximately 2.5 trillion dollars from 2001 thru 2010 http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/26314.html

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Ravenman

@Mr_Smashy

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.

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.

No spending increases, just tax cuts, eh?

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?

Well how much of the social security increase is the result of an aging population?

They can’t very well attack medicare after defending the most wasteful parts of medicare during the healthcare debate.

[yorick73]

@Dick_Dastardly

@yorick73

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.

YOUNG: Killing Keynesianism? - Washington Times

It’s a GOP lobbyist writing in the Moonie Times and claiming that government spending can’t act as a stimulus because it’s too big a chunk of the economy. That’s definitely a new one.There’s probably some lefty somewhere on the internets arguing that private sector spending increases can’t stimulate the economy because the private sector is too big a chunk of the economy.

I found it interesting when I first read it a few days ago. I remembered it because the story you linked to stated the Asian stimulus in terms of percent of GDP. Perhaps he’s on to something.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@xtisme

Here is a bit less deceptive chart that tracks unemployment from 1970 through 2007.

-XT

Yes, but then do you still think its reasonable to say that tax cuts create jobs and then point to the business cycle when history shows the opposite correlation? Don’t you think the fact that econmic cycles seem to correlate exactly opposite to what you would predict if tax cuts really did such wonders for the economy undercuts your position a little bit?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@yorick73

@VinylTurnip

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.

You know that the unemployment rate was ALREADY 9% when Obama signed the bill, you knew that right? So does that tell you anything about why it would be hard for the stimulus to keep the unemployment rate under 8% (I think it was like 7% when she said it). To me that fact that the economy was so much worse than the folk who were supporting the crappy 800 billion dollar stimulus rather than a more robust stimulus meant that we needed that larger stimulus.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Dick_Dastardly

@yorick73

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.

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.
Asia’s Keynesians take pride in prudence | Financial Times
*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.

Well the thing is that Asian economies have always been better at central planning than the west.

I think China’s stimulus was $600 billion and their economy is a Third the size of ours. They don’t fuck around. They KNOW that the survival of the communist party rests on a vibrant economy so they took all that dry powder they had saved up while we were engaging in tax cuts and deficit spending and overshot the stimulus because they realized that the consequences of undershooting it were too great.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@yorick73

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.

YOUNG: Killing Keynesianism? - Washington Times

I totally fucking agree. When times are fat we should tax more than we spend so that in lean times we can spend more than we tax AND I think that we should limit government spending to those areas where the government can do things the private sector cannot or will not do. We can argue about the policy of whether we should feed the hungry or clothe the poor but in the end we should pay for it or shut up and live with hungry naked poor people.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Mr_Smashy

@Ravenman

As a govie, I know that I could quit my job, get hired by industry, get paid more, work fewer hours, and have less actual work product in my particular field compared to what I do now.

But I like actually producing work that is substantive and somewhat important.

So your pleas to “just trust you” and accede to how you see the world working are falling on deaf ears here.

Unless you are an undersecretary or higher, I highly doubt you would work fewer hours as a contractor. How many weekends and nights are you losing by doing proposals (which we do in addition to our ‘day jobs’) these days? If you were re-badged, you probably would get (slightly) better salary, but worse benefits and virtually no job security.

I’m sure you think the work is important, else you’d probably change jobs. And sometimes government jobs are, you’ll have to provide more details if you want a comment on that. There are some govie jobs where the incentives are correct - certain fee-for-service orgs like franchise fund outfits (FEDSIM, GSA, DOI/NBC come to mind). But they operate more like a little business within the government, don’t they? With clients and leads and solution offerings and constant pressure to perform and deliver…

Far too many govies are just there to punch the clock. I see it every day. If you are really a govie, then you know this to be true. Contractors are always worried about their contract, winning the recompete, and they know that they could easily get cut if they can’t deliver real value day after day.

Again, it’s all about the incentives.

Aren’t you admitting here that Government can in fact be just as efficient as the private sector is the incentives are structured correctly?

I can name a few government types that can make more in the private sector doing less work and they don’t have to be undersecretaries, just GS 15s. I don’t know about tripling the salary for less work part of it but I am pretty sure taht a lot of the higher greade government workers could make triple the salary for maybe 50% or double the work.

Security cleared IT folks come to mind. Government regulators, attorneys and scientists probably fall into this category and we know military special forces fall into this category.

[Dick_Dastardly]

@Damuri_Ajashi

@Dick_Dastardly

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.
Asia’s Keynesians take pride in prudence | Financial Times
*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.

Well the thing is that Asian economies have always been better at central planning than the west.

I think China’s stimulus was $600 billion and their economy is a Third the size of ours. They don’t fuck around. They KNOW that the survival of the communist party rests on a vibrant economy so they took all that dry powder they had saved up while we were engaging in tax cuts and deficit spending and overshot the stimulus because they realized that the consequences of undershooting it were too great.

And they hadn’t had to bail out their banking system with hundreds of billions of dollars, had their economy collapse into recession at a rate unprecedented since 1929, were in a position to cut interest rates, were running a trade surplus, weren’t running a budget deficit…

We’re in a gigantic hole compared to countries like China where the worst that happened was that growth slowed down quite a lot for a couple of quarters. We’ve got zero interest rates and no way to cut them futther, huge trade/budget deficits, a financial system held together with baling wire and duct tape that will be unable to function properly for many years due to the fact a lot of its largest banks are hiding vast amounts of bad debt, a powerful political bloc that will prevent massive fiscal stimulus being enacted and a central bank scared to loosen monetary policy any more than it has. Basically exactly like Japan was in 1990 except with a trade deficit. We could easily be looking at a decade or two of rubbish economic growth, growing debt etc. just like Japan.

[Mr_Smashy]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Aren’t you admitting here that Government can in fact be just as efficient as the private sector is the incentives are structured correctly?

I can name a few government types that can make more in the private sector doing less work and they don’t have to be undersecretaries, just GS 15s. I don’t know about tripling the salary for less work part of it but I am pretty sure taht a lot of the higher greade government workers could make triple the salary for maybe 50% or double the work.

Security cleared IT folks come to mind. Government regulators, attorneys and scientists probably fall into this category and we know military special forces fall into this category.

Dude, people are people. If the structure, incentives, etc are right then anyone can succeed. Now, there’s also the natural selection at work; people who tend to be lazy, slackers, looking to punch clocks tend to gravitate to govie jobs (in fact, any union work).

I will grant you that military special forces types, when they go to the Blackwaters of the world (or X, Z, or whatever goofy name they changed to) will make tons more, for less work. But also less pension (actually - none, they are 1099s - my neighbor… who just called me as I’m writing this to go smoke a cigar… was one of these guys, I think for triple canopy or dyncorp or one of those pipehitters).

Anyway, cleared IT infosec/IA guys ALWAYS make more in private sector than public, assuming they can fog a mirror and/or know the world of C&A, DIACAP, and are not an idiot, etc. Always. No contest, we’re talking like 2-3x difference in base.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Ravenman

As a govie, I know that I could quit my job, get hired by industry, get paid more, work fewer hours, and have less actual work product in my particular field compared to what I do now.

But I like actually producing work that is substantive and somewhat important.

So your pleas to “just trust you” and accede to how you see the world working are falling on deaf ears here.

This is true in a lot of areas but mostly at the top end of the pay scale. A lot of GS 15s can walk out of government to a better paying (in every respect) job and work similar or better hours, the front office secretary, not so much.

Anyone with a security clearance (especially in IT) can leave government and get a huge raise, but they tend to be people who think that they do important work (and usually they do) and generally aren’t inclined to leave.

Military special forces can leave and join a mercenary company for a LOT more than the military pays.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Dick_Dastardly

@Damuri_Ajashi

Well the thing is that Asian economies have always been better at central planning than the west.

I think China’s stimulus was $600 billion and their economy is a Third the size of ours. They don’t fuck around. They KNOW that the survival of the communist party rests on a vibrant economy so they took all that dry powder they had saved up while we were engaging in tax cuts and deficit spending and overshot the stimulus because they realized that the consequences of undershooting it were too great.

And they hadn’t had to bail out their banking system with hundreds of billions of dollars, had their economy collapse into recession at a rate unprecedented since 1929, were in a position to cut interest rates, were running a trade surplus, weren’t running a budget deficit…

We’re in a gigantic hole compared to countries like China where the worst that happened was that growth slowed down quite a lot for a couple of quarters. We’ve got zero interest rates and no way to cut them futther, huge trade/budget deficits, a financial system held together with baling wire and duct tape that will be unable to function properly for many years due to the fact a lot of its largest banks are hiding vast amounts of bad debt, a powerful political bloc that will prevent massive fiscal stimulus being enacted and a central bank scared to loosen monetary policy any more than it has. Basically exactly like Japan was in 1990 except with a trade deficit. We could easily be looking at a decade or two of rubbish economic growth, growing debt etc. just like Japan.

Yeah, a lot of people have been concerned about a lost decade in the USA. I hope we don’t get to that. I don’t want to have to invade Canada.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Mr_Smashy

@Damuri_Ajashi

Aren’t you admitting here that Government can in fact be just as efficient as the private sector is the incentives are structured correctly?

I can name a few government types that can make more in the private sector doing less work and they don’t have to be undersecretaries, just GS 15s. I don’t know about tripling the salary for less work part of it but I am pretty sure taht a lot of the higher greade government workers could make triple the salary for maybe 50% or double the work.

Security cleared IT folks come to mind. Government regulators, attorneys and scientists probably fall into this category and we know military special forces fall into this category.

Dude, people are people. If the structure, incentives, etc are right then anyone can succeed.

So now that we’ve established that the government CAN in fact operate just as efficiently if not more efficiently than the private sector in some cases, why wouldn’t we have government handle things in those areas?

Now, there’s also the natural selection at work; people who tend to be lazy, slackers, looking to punch clocks tend to gravitate to govie jobs (in fact, any union work).

That has not been my experience. My experience has been that people don’t seek jobs in government to be slackers, my experience has been that the inability to fire people insulates the folks who do just enough NOT to get fired so the government tends to accumulate them. The government also accumulates people who get a greater sense of purpose from working for their government than working for the private sector.

My fried was a securities lawyer in NYC and he recently took a 75% pay cut to work at the SEC and he’s never been happier. Its not just the more humane hours (going from 60+ hours a week to 40 hours a week), he feels like he is doing something worthwhile.

I will grant you that military special forces types, when they go to the Blackwaters of the world (or X, Z, or whatever goofy name they changed to) will make tons more, for less work. But also less pension (actually - none, they are 1099s - my neighbor… who just called me as I’m writing this to go smoke a cigar… was one of these guys, I think for triple canopy or dyncorp or one of those pipehitters).

Anyway, cleared IT infosec/IA guys ALWAYS make more in private sector than public, assuming they can fog a mirror and/or know the world of C&A, DIACAP, and are not an idiot, etc. Always. No contest, we’re talking like 2-3x difference in base.

Its not just special forces and IT specialists with clearance.

A large percentage of Justice Department lawyers (heck a lot of government lawyers generally) could walk into much higher paying positions in the private sector. They would have to work longer hours with less job security but their pay would be a LOT higher.

A lot of government scientists would have no trouble getting a better paying private sector job.

A lot of top brass military officers could make a lot more money in the private sector.

There are regulators throughout the federal government that would make more money in the private sector.

I’m really only familiar with the federal employees here in the DC area but it seems to me that a lot of these folks can do better (they would frequently have to work harder) moneywise in the private sector.

[Mr_Smashy]

@Damuri_Ajashi

So now that we’ve established that the government CAN in fact operate just as efficiently if not more efficiently than the private sector in some cases, why wouldn’t we have government handle things in those areas?

Yes, ***if ***the government were better structured it ***could ***be as efficient (even moreso, due to economies of scale) than private sector. But the reality is, and if you are in the DC area and familiar with the situation then you know this, it’s not.

It’s structural. Incentives. The kind of people it attracts. Also, regulations to avoid OCI and giving contracts to your brother in law Bubba… those same regulations protect the integrity of the procurement process, but that’s also why the tea party and ohters have complained that the stim money took so dern long to get out to those ‘shovel ready’ projects.

The Feds simply aren’t really set up well to do that kind of spending. Not as efficiently as the private sector, anyway - which is why tax cuts are almost always a better way to do it (to answer the OP). And when projects and grants are awarded as something of a political slush fund, which anyone can plainly see was the situation (Harry Reid’s high speed train, anyone?), then capital is not allocated as efficiently as the private sector would do it.