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I'm not even arguing that Obama's stimulus was the best solution to the problem. I don't think it was.
I'm saying that if, without any stimulus at all, we would now be in say 15-20%% official unemployment stats with negative GDP growth for the last six months, then probably the stimulus was worth it. The discounted present value of future lost tax revenue due to significantly more depressed economic activity is likely to be significantly more than $13 trillion.
If, on the other hand, without the stimulus, we would now be at the same 9% official unemployment level or less, then obviously we would conclude that the stimulus is a failure.
It's a concept called opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is what you should be looking at when you make financial investment decisions of any kind. It's not easy to properly measure.
Lastly, giving $11 grand directly to all unemployed people is likely to be an extremely ineffective idea - probably no better than Obama's stimulus. Some of those people will spend some of the money, but probably very few jobs will come of it as hardly any of those people will ever open the small businesses you suggest. A good portion of the dollars really have to go to maintaining existing jobs and creating new jobs, else the cycle of depressed economic activity will get iteratively worse.
What we can say for sure is that it didn't work "as advertised". We also now know that the recession ended at a time when only a small fraction of the funds had been spent. It would appear that a $50B-$100B stimulus would have accomplished the same thing. And finally, we now know that the WH economic team didn't have a clue what was happening, and that makes the whole thing a $800B crapshoot.
What we can say for sure is that it didn't work "as advertised". We also now know that the recession ended at a time when only a small fraction of the funds had been spent. It would appear that a $50B-$100B stimulus would have accomplished the same thing. And finally, we now know that the WH economic team didn't have a clue what was happening, and that makes the whole thing a $800B crapshoot.
I dare you to go on that Unemployment forum and tell them that the recession has already ended.
I dare you to go on that Unemployment forum and tell them that the recession has already ended.
You don't have to go over there to find widespread skepticism. But the recession as recessions are officially defined did end in Jun2009. Some may argue that the official definition isn't valid, but it is what it is.
the steal from us package did exactly what i thought it would do, nothing but pay off the democrat supporters, raise the deficit and the debt to unsustainable levels, and create a few very expensive, cost wise, jobs that were limited in length. sorry democrats but we dont need turtle tunnels, frisbee golf parks, and other crap.
Well the stimulus has actauly saved 3.3 million jobbs.
You have multiple links to prove that? Actual jobs, long term, not just for a single year or less? Really? Please do provide from unbiased source. In case you haven't noticed, the country continues to lose more jobs than it "saves" or "creates" monthly by about 170,000.
I was expecting it to be what they said it was. A massive infrastructure bill that would produce alot of jobs. Insteadd it was a shell game that 93% went to special interest groups and 7% to stimulus.As even CNN said it turned out to be the eqaul on infrastruture of the big dig in Boston for the entire US. But we shpuld have been surprised because the sedconf half of TARP was supposed to go to housing solution. Instead it went the same way plus to Gm and chrysler. They would veen spend any of it for extensions of unemployment.
I'm not even arguing that Obama's stimulus was the best solution to the problem. I don't think it was.
I'm saying that if, without any stimulus at all, we would now be in say 15-20%% official unemployment stats with negative GDP growth for the last six months, then probably the stimulus was worth it.
0bama and the democrats actually helped kill jobs, investment and growth, by destabilizing the whole private sector business environment, with erratic behavior.
They demonized one sector of the economy after another, from banks, to doctors, from insurance companies to car manufacturers. They demonized them for the compensation they paid their employees, their health care coverage, their overseas ventures, sales meeting, the decor of their offices to the transportation they used when congress summoned them for one of their many inquisitions.
Businesses need to plan five years down the road before making investments in new property or inventory, and hiring new employees. Businesses had no clue what the future would look like when it came to taxes, health insurance, energy costs or other future government mandates and regulations,.
The democrats spent a year working on new health care laws, while running up historically high deficits, and creating new federal powers.
Here we sit, almost two years after the democrats took over complete control, and we do not even know what our taxes will be in two months, and we are threatened with promises of a climate change act which will cause all energy costs to skyrocket.
No good business owners would make investments, expand, hire new employees, or take risks if they do not know what their taxes or energy costs will be, its October and we do not know what our taxes will be next year. We need stability, not stimulus.
What did I expect from the stimulus? Not a lot I suppose but two days ago I gave a fellow twenty one hundred dollars bills for a piece of agricultural equipment and he asked me if they were real or counterfeit. I replied, "Would it make any difference?"
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