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Another stimulus
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2009 Nov 23, 9:05am 2,140 views 5 comments
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I agree that more stimulus isn't necessarily going to fix things, but the article is absurd in its implication that it's actually making things worse by using classical logical fallacies.
Here are the things that will actually end the recession:
1. Hugely important new discovery, on par with electricity, the automobile, or the internet. This will take a minimum of 10 years from the time of discovery, and more likely 20-30.
2. The eventual unwinding of all this bad debt and a return to stability. This will take another 2-3 years.
Smart money is on #2. Unfortunately, #2 simply is an end to things getting worse, not a vehicle to get things better. We won't ever go back to where we were in 2007 without #1, because 2007 was based on a great big lie.
4X
2009 Nov 29, 2:15pm
I agree that more stimulus isn’t necessarily going to fix things, but the article is absurd in its implication that it’s actually making things worse by using classical logical fallacies.
Here are the things that will actually end the recession:
1. Hugely important new discovery, on par with electricity, the automobile, or the internet. This will take a minimum of 10 years from the time of discovery, and more likely 20-30.
2. The eventual unwinding of all this bad debt and a return to stability. This will take another 2-3 years.
Smart money is on #2. Unfortunately, #2 simply is an end to things getting worse, not a vehicle to get things better. We won’t ever go back to where we were in 2007 without #1, because 2007 was based on a great big lie.
Hence the push for going green?
I agree that more stimulus isn’t necessarily going to fix things, but the article is absurd in its implication that it’s actually making things worse by using classical logical fallacies.
Here are the things that will actually end the recession:
1. Hugely important new discovery, on par with electricity, the automobile, or the internet. This will take a minimum of 10 years from the time of discovery, and more likely 20-30.
2. The eventual unwinding of all this bad debt and a return to stability. This will take another 2-3 years.
Smart money is on #2. Unfortunately, #2 simply is an end to things getting worse, not a vehicle to get things better. We won’t ever go back to where we were in 2007 without #1, because 2007 was based on a great big lie.
Hence the push for going green?
"Going green" can mean one of two things here:
1. The legitimate concern over climate change
2. The bullshit marketing gimmick that every company in the sun is using to try to sell more product to gullible but well-meaning people.
The former isn't going to cause a surge in economic activity unless it leads to important breakthroughs in energy or possibly transportation.
The latter might lead to a bubble, but that's about it. Tearing down your existing home and replacing it with "green" construction isn't helping the environment.
4X
2009 Dec 2, 8:18am
Kevin says
I agree that more stimulus isn’t necessarily going to fix things, but the article is absurd in its implication that it’s actually making things worse by using classical logical fallacies.
Here are the things that will actually end the recession:
1. Hugely important new discovery, on par with electricity, the automobile, or the internet. This will take a minimum of 10 years from the time of discovery, and more likely 20-30.
2. The eventual unwinding of all this bad debt and a return to stability. This will take another 2-3 years.
Smart money is on #2. Unfortunately, #2 simply is an end to things getting worse, not a vehicle to get things better. We won’t ever go back to where we were in 2007 without #1, because 2007 was based on a great big lie.
Hence the push for going green?
“Going green†can mean one of two things here:
1. The legitimate concern over climate change
2. The bullshit marketing gimmick that every company in the sun is using to try to sell more product to gullible but well-meaning people.
The former isn’t going to cause a surge in economic activity unless it leads to important breakthroughs in energy or possibly transportation.
The latter might lead to a bubble, but that’s about it. Tearing down your existing home and replacing it with “green†construction isn’t helping the environment.
Good points.
Cited: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/23/another-stimulus//print/
Monday, November 23, 2009
EDITORIAL: Another stimulus
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
President Obama and the Democratic Congress forced through a $787 billion stimulus package to create jobs and try to give a jump start to the economy. Instead, the nation's unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent and continues to rise. Despite the clear failure of the government's massive deficit spending, House Democrats are planning a second so-called stimulus that promises to do even more economic harm.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to move a package by Christmas that will extend expiring unemployment benefits and approve more highway and infrastructure spending as a gambit to create jobs. It won't work. This merely robs money from the private sector to pay for the make-work whims of lawmakers and bureaucrats, which undercuts job retention and creation by private firms that in general are more efficient than government.
In October alone, the number of unemployed Americans increased by 558,000 to 15.7 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That huge mass doesn't include those who have stopped looking for work. Despite the evidence, the White House continues to estimate that 640,000 jobs have been "created or saved" since the stimulus was put in place. The administration's math is overstated even by its own accounts. The Recovery.org Web site, which is supposed to track the impact of stimulus spending, has reported nonexisting congressional districts in all 50 states that purportedly received more than $6.4 billion in stimulus funds that "created" thousands of phantom jobs.
Democrats are giving lip service to various ways to pay for this new bureaucratic largess to avoid making the deficit even larger, but the options are neither convincing nor promising. Instead of cutting other government spending to cover the new tab, some Democrats are pushing tax increases or the use of leftover financial-sector bailout money, the latter of which is deficit spending but - the argument goes - not so bad because it was already approved.
A misguided proposal from liberal Democrats and the AFL-CIO would tax Wall Street transactions - including stock trades and future swaps - to pay for a new spending package. In our globalized economy, trading can be done anywhere. If enacted, this plan would undercut profits in the U.S. financial services industry by pushing traders offshore to avoid taxation.
More spending and more taxes won't spark an economic turnaround. The last spending spree of nearly a trillion dollars couldn't prevent unemployment from racing past 1 in 10. More spending and more taxes will simply result in more of the same: more unemployed.
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