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by Liberty_one
July 15, 2010 at 8:04 a.m.
Has Stimulus Failed? Take Two
The newly elected president was left with an economic mess. The bad policies of the previous administration and unwisely taking the country to war had left the economy in trouble, with high unemployment and declining GNP. The new president decided to implement a drastic change in economic policy not long into his first year in office and was roundly criticized by his opponents. However, by August signs of recovery were already visible. August of 1921, that is. By the next year unemployment had been cut in half, and a year after that it was down to 2.4 percent after being 12 percent in 1921. The Harding administration had cut government spending in half, cut taxes and reduced the national deficit. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve kept interest rates high, thus keeping inflation down.
It's almost been a year and a half since Obama's stimulus package was passed, and have we seen comparable results? Not even close. At what point in time are stimulus supporters going to admit this policy was a mistake? The thing is, there's a playbook out there that worked. Cut down the size of government, reduce the tax burden and quit crowding out private investment with government debt. The Obama administration has gone the exact opposite direction and we aren't seeing the results. The gains in the stock market and housing prices are being offset by the declining value of the dollar. Private investment and savings continue to decline while public debt soars to new and frightening highs.
The excuse for failure so far has been that Obama was handed such a mess that recovery is difficult. Certainly that is true, but at some point in time the policies we are following will have to be examined and declared successful or failures. I would like to know how long it will take. I am suggesting two years, since that is how long it took the Harding administration to arrive at complete recovery from the depression of 1920-21.
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Liberty_One (anonymous) says…
The Obama administration's response is that the stimulus worked! If not for the record-setting splurge of public money, things would be worse! I wish Obama would share his alternate reality machine which can tell us how things would have been under different policies.
Of course in this reality it has been a complete failure, as things are even worse than the Obama administration predicted it would have been without stimulus. Unemployment remains high, and the actual figure is higher since it doesn't count people who quit looking for a job. Government spending doesn't work. Cutting spending does. It's that simple.
Liberty_One (anonymous) says…
Read about the forgotten depression of 1921 here:
http://mises.org/daily/3788
bearded_gnome (anonymous) says…
by the measure of what this regime's own leaders said, the stimulus/porkulus has certainly failed.
they said unemployment would not go anywhere near this high,
and now we have mostly government jobs, temp governmentjobs, briefly bolstering the employment figures. while employers are quite hesitant to hire given the regulatory and taxation environment of Obamanomics.
"three letter word: J-O-B-S" Jawbone Joe Biden.
Liberty_One (anonymous) says…
Here is the economic explanation for why stimulus spending fails to create jobs, from "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazzlit, Chapter 4, Part 1:
"Two arguments are put forward for the bridge, one of which is mainly heard before it is built, the other of which is mainly heard after it has been completed. The first argument is that it will provide employment. It will provide, say, 500 jobs for a year. The implication is that these are jobs that would not otherwise have come into existence.
This is what is immediately seen. But if we have trained ourselves to look beyond immediate to secondary consequences, and beyond those who are directly benefited by a government project to others who are indirectly affected, a different picture presents itself. It is true that a particular group of bridgeworkers may receive more employment than otherwise. But the bridge has to be paid for out of taxes. For every dollar that is spent on the bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $10 million the taxpayers will lose $10 million. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.
Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence. They are the jobs destroyed by the $10 million taken from the taxpayers. All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project. More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, television technicians, clothing workers, farmers."
You can read this book for free at:
http://jim.com/econ/chap04p1.html
Liberty_One (anonymous) says…
continued...
"But then we come to the second argument. The bridge exists. It is, let us suppose, a beautiful and not an ugly bridge. It has come into being through the magic of government spending. Where would it have been if the obstructionists and the reactionaries had had their way? There would have been no bridge. The country would have been just that much poorer. Here again the government spenders have the better of the argument with all those who cannot see beyond the immediate range of their physical eyes. They can see the bridge. But if they have taught themselves to look for indirect as well as direct consequences they can once more see in the eye of imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence. They can see the unbuilt homes, the unmade cars and washing machines, the unmade dresses and coats, perhaps the ungrown and unsold foodstuffs. To see these uncreated things requires a kind of imagination that not many people have. We can think of these nonexistent objects once, perhaps, but we cannot keep them before our minds as we can the bridge that we pass every working day. What has happened is merely that one thing has been created instead of others."
You can read this book for free at:
http://jim.com/econ/chap04p1.html
Liberty_One (anonymous) says…
Like the Soviet Union, the Obama administration has been claiming the glorious success of its policies while things get worse, so now they've been calling for an extension of the stimulus spending that didn't work to encourage more of the recovery that doesn't exist.
Boston_Corbett (anonymous) says…
More self-stimulation from Liberty One.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
These are my favorite responses--the ones by people not quite knowledgable enough to dispute anything I've said, but "feel" I'm wrong, so they have to make comments about me instead. There are some pretty sharp people here like Jimo, bad_dog and others who seriously challenge my statements. Those are much more difficult to respond to. So thanks for the softball and keep them coming!
grammaddy (anonymous) replies…
Pretty full of yourself this morning, huh? I see out of the 8 comment, 6 of them are yours. Have you thought about where we might be now if it wasn't for the stimulus bill? Everything I've read about it says it's doing what it was supposed to do and maybe even a little better than expected. I guess it depends on what news you believe. If you want to find fault it will be easy. always. I prefer to have a little faith in a man who is more educated than most on here and not believe he got elected just to he can tear the country apart with his Muslim, socialist, communist, whatever ways.Everything could be much much worse.And yes unemployment is higher than it has been in a while, but it's not the 12% that was predicted in the summer of '08.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
Just have a lot to say this morning--been reviewing Hazzlit's great book--you should check it out.
And Obama and his team are all very smart people--but I would suggest that they care more about politics than economics. Throwing money around to help favored groups used to be called vote buying. Today it's called stimulus spending. Taking someone's home and giving it to a developer used to be called theft. Today it's called economic development. etc.
Regardless, you say everything could be much worse, but everything could also be much better. I talk in the blog about a playbook that's been proven to work--one which Obama will not even talk about.
And of course you've heard that things are doing better--the Obama administration will never admit failure just like the Bush administration would never admit its mistakes. But the facts speak for themselves. We're almost 18 months out now, and things are decidedly NOT better.
grammaddy (anonymous) replies…
Agreed. The only real problem with your analogy is the "playbook".This is a much different country than Harding had to deal with.And lifting prohibition,IMHO helped out a lot with a new tax base to draw from. Maybe it's time to de-criminalize, tax and regulate marijuana.
Also, how many jobs were outsourced during his administration?Recovery will not happen overnight and it won't happen as quickly as we all would like, but I think we're headed in the right direction.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
"how many jobs were outsourced during his administration?"
They had the exact same concerns back then about outsourcing that we have today. Hazlitt's book was written in 1946 and he addresses these and similar issues in chapters 10, 11 and 14.
ralphralph (anonymous) says…
Dear Leader likes him some debt.
remember_username (anonymous) says…
Actually Liberty, I think it will take longer than two years, and it will never be the recovery anyone wants. Things are quite a bit different now than in 1920 so I think it's unfair to use the Harding administration as a metric.
In general terms, the actions taken at the end of Pres. Bush's administration and at the beginning of Pres. Obama's administration were done to dampen the descent of the economic decline, and keep the bottom from being catastrophically deep. The obvious outcome of that is that the turnaround point would be shallower but lead to a long drawn out recovery. Economic growth rate in the long run was sacrificed to minimize the human cost of a harsher, even though shorter recession/depression.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
"the actions taken at the end of Pres. Bush's administration and at the beginning of Pres. Obama's administration were done to dampen the descent of the economic "
I agree to an extent. In the short term it will make the economy appear to be stabilizing, but that is actually part of the problem. In the long term these actions will only make things worse. Our deficit spending and money-inflation ways have caught up to us. If we allowed things to bottom out businesses would fail and people would lose their jobs, but then the business assets would be liquidated, prices would fall making things more affordable so that people could take lower paying jobs but maintain the same standard of living, the malinvestments would be cleared and then the economy would be back on track.
The current actions are only delayed the eventual suffering, making it worse. It's like giving someone who is exhausted a bunch of caffeine. He will appear to have regained energy, but all that's really going on is the last resources are being exhausted and the eventual crash deepened.
remember_username (anonymous) replies…
It's always about balance the human cost of laissez-faire versus federal (societal) intervention. The American today is a completely different creature as the one found in the past. A full blown economic collapse would be more devastating than a century ago, and we just barely avoided one. It wouldn't be just businesses wound fail and people would loose their jobs it would be much, much worse. Also the stimulus was no where near a bunch of caffeine, our economy didn't regain anything. It was more akin to giving the exhausted runner enough energy just to keep walking a little further in the hopes of finding more resources. Crash he might...eventually, and hard...but only if the fans keeping insisting that he run.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
"Also the stimulus was no where near a bunch of caffeine, our economy didn't regain anything."
I know. It's a sign that the ability of stimulus spending to delay the crash is becoming ineffective. I fear the worst may be just around the corner. The only positive I see is that US agriculture has only ever had one problem: overproduction. So I don't think people will starve. But there will be a huge reduction in our overall standard of living.
dd0031 (anonymous) replies…
"If we allowed things to bottom out businesses would fail and people would lose their jobs, but then the business assets would be liquidated, prices would fall making things more affordable so that people could take lower paying jobs but maintain the same standard of living, the malinvestments would be cleared and then the economy would be back on track."
Unfortunately, you don't seem to understand the effects of the system-wide monetary deflation you seem to advocate so cheerily. Deflation leads to far less investment because it taxes borrowers to subsidize lenders (if you borrow $10 today but currency deflates tomorrow, you owe much more in real dollars). Because investment and development doesn't happen without access to credit and liquidity, this sort of deflation would result in a deep depression. In fact, it has, cf., The Great Depression.
Criticizing the stimulus package may make for political huzzahs, but unless you'd prefer more suffering, unemployment, death rather than less, I'm glad---and you should be, too--that those who advocate your position weren't in power.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
Straw man. Sorry, but I never said anything about monetary deflation.
dd0031 (anonymous) replies…
So then you're not advocating the policy you note above?
autie (anonymous) says…
Did stimulus fail? Nope. We were at the brink of totally devasting depression...and we did not slide into the abyss. From that standpoint, I would say it worked out OK.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
See my 11:48 reply to remember_username above.
kansanbygrace (anonymous) says…
If we're reflecting on historic occasions, don't overlook the 1970's and early '80's. By 1979, new economic policies had been started, with a new head of the Fed. A bipartisan legislature had initiated policies that the Reagan administration inherited and carried on. It was still nearly two years before that recession, not nearly as severe as our current situation, was to the point of "recovery."
The current situation is different in that there is very little bipartisan attempt to address the needs, this being maybe the most truculent minority in the history of the USA. The new policies were initiated by the last Pres., to some extent, but the timeline is about 3 years behind that of the 1983 recovery based on contrariness instead of cooperation.
The recovery will continue when the legislature becomes willing to do their job, rather than play poorly together. Then, their legislation may have some effect.
It is completely incorrect to lay the current mess on the Executive branch. It is legislative responsibility to write the laws, the executive's to flesh out the regulations and rules of how to do it and put it into action.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
"It is completely incorrect to lay the current mess on the Executive branch. It is legislative responsibility to write the laws"
True, but the President proposes the budget, signs it, and it was Obama who, along with House and Senate leaders, pushed strongly for the stimulus in both Congress and with the public. In addition, he is the biggest spokesman for the stimulus and has, on several occasions, suggested a second stimulus may be needed.
kansanbygrace (anonymous) replies…
Sorry, you may have been out of the room, but the stimulus spending was initiated in September before the election in which Obama was elected. The President who proposed the initiation of this strategy of bailouts, major loans and stimulus was President George W. Bush. Yes, Obama followed through on the strategy, and it's clear that several aspects of the economy have benefited positively.
There is widespread support for follow through on the stimulus, as the jobs, although expressing a cessation of loss trend and re-initiation of positive growth, would benefit from a complete course, insuring the cycle follows positive trend without starving it.
Pres. Reagan, you may remember, followed through with stimulus for all eight of his years, adding 186% to the national debt in his two terms, In the long run, the benefit was clear.
kansanbygrace (anonymous) replies…
Sorry, you may have been out of the room, but the stimulus spending was initiated in September before the election in which Obama was elected. The President who proposed the initiation of this strategy of bailouts, major loans and stimulus was President George W. Bush. Yes, Obama followed through on the strategy, and it's clear that several aspects of the economy have benefited positively.
There is widespread support for follow through on the stimulus, as the jobs, although expressing a cessation of loss trend and re-initiation of positive growth, would benefit from a complete course, insuring the cycle follows positive trend without starving it.
Pres. Reagan, you may remember, followed through with stimulus for all eight of his years, adding 186% to the national debt in his two terms, In the long run, the benefit was clear.
kansanbygrace (anonymous) replies…
Sorry, you may have been out of the room, but the stimulus spending was initiated in September before the election in which Obama was elected. The President who proposed the initiation of this strategy of bailouts, major loans and stimulus was President George W. Bush. Yes, Obama followed through on the strategy, and it's clear that several aspects of the economy have benefited positively.
There is widespread support for follow through on the stimulus, as the jobs, although expressing a cessation of loss trend and re-initiation of positive growth, would benefit from a complete course, insuring the cycle follows positive trend without starving it.
Pres. Reagan, you may remember, followed through with stimulus for all eight of his years, adding 186% to the national debt in his two terms, In the long run, the benefit was clear.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
Sorry, you may have been out of the room, but I'm no republican and throwing Bush and Reagan's spending in my face as an excuse for Obama doing it won't fly with me.
"Obama followed through on the strategy, and it's clear that several aspects of the economy have benefited positively."
No, it's not clear. Please elaborate how unemployment over 16% is a good thing. I know the government says it's only around 10%, but they don't count people who have given up looking for a job in their numbers anymore.
"Reagan, you may remember, followed through with stimulus for all eight of his years, adding 186% to the national debt in his two terms, In the long run, the benefit was clear."
No, it's not clear. Please elaborate how the crushing national deficit I am going to have to work to pay off the rest of my life is a benefit.
kansanbygrace (anonymous) replies…
Stopping the loss of jobs is an improvement. Adding new jobs is an improvement. Anyone can make up pseudo-statistics and throw them in, but it means nothing. If that's not clear to you, I give up, your mind is set and reality isn't really in your focus.
You were the one using a historical example, I used one more similar in nature, more recent, and more reflective of comparative conditions.
You will not pay the debt back with your taxes. I won't either.
If we were serious, we'd select seriously successful academics, businesspeople and professionals to represent us for a term or two, then send someone else to replace them.. They would be less inclined to accept the bribery to keep themselves in office than career politicians, who continually prove they are duplicitous.
We could balance the budget and begin payback by simply stopping the wars of convenience.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
Reality isn't my focus? Are you kidding me? You ignore the statistics on unemployment as being made up but I'm the one not paying attention to reality? Obama hasn't stopped the job loss at all. The government is rigging the numbers to not look as bad, but it's at 16% and getting worse.
"You will not pay the debt back with your taxes. I won't either."
Wow, you accused me of ignoring reality.
"I used one more similar in nature, more recent, and more reflective of comparative conditions. "
I asked what the benefit was and you ignored that question. If you can't support your example it doesn't seem to apt then.
"If we were serious, we'd select seriously successful academics, businesspeople and professionals to represent us for a term or two, then send someone else to replace them.. They would be less inclined to accept the bribery to keep themselves in office than career politicians, who continually prove they are duplicitous."
Ah yes, if only the "right" people were in charge. Sorry, but there are no right people for the job. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Power attracts people who are power-hungry. Again, I find it very odd that you would accuse me of ignoring reality and then make such statements.
kansanbygrace (anonymous) replies…
All statistics have conditions and definitions. Look at empirical information. More jobs is improvement over less jobs. That's my point.
Your taxes and mine are not seven grains of sand in the debt this nation has accrued.
Your argument now boils down to "government is evil".
Is Anarchy your real bottom-line?
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
"More jobs is improvement over less jobs. That's my point."
It would be an improvement. Sure would be nice if it happened sometime soon, but that's doubtful.
"Your taxes and mine are not seven grains of sand in the debt this nation has accrued. "
And yet I still have to pay them or the government will confiscate my property using force.
"Your argument now boils down to "government is evil"
A gross simplification and a straw-man to boot. The purpose of government is to protect individual rights. Not to create jobs, not to redistribute wealth, not to tell people how to live, but to protect individual rights like life, liberty and property. Anything beyond that is harmful of the true ends of government.
kansanbygrace (anonymous) replies…
The Constitution, fleshing out the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence, codified 'provide for the common defense,' ' promote the general welfare', and 'regulate commerce.' The founders were neither ignoramuses nor polyannas. They had a few generations of knowledge that "more for me" will drive the unscrupulous to steal and that poverty and ineptitude are worth attempting to eliminate through education and establishment of the social contract as an enforceable code. Regulation of commerce is a practical, visible necessity.
Feel free to idealize no government, a situation that has exactly zero evidence of success in the history of humankind. I would prefer it minimal and accountable, and think that working toward that end preferable to imagining the non-existent hand of anarchy to be the end-all solution.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
OK, I see you've got an axe to grind and don't want to address the things I've said. Instead of venting here write your own blog about how unworkable anarchy is. If you want to talk about the things I advocate for, like limited government with checks and balances, then feel free.
kansanbygrace (anonymous) replies…
Your article wasn't about limited government nor checks and balances. It was a screed declaring total failure of the stimulus.
Facts are contrary to your declaration. We could quibble about numbers, but you declare that all official and neutral sources of information are false.
Everything I've said in this weird little string pertains directly to your statements.
camper (anonymous) says…
I agree with your points Liberty. At this point I give the stimulus a grade of C. I think it was necessary to prevent our economy from dipping into a depression, from which I think a recovery would be more painful and take even longer to recover from. Much of the stimulus money went towards supporting state budgets and was effective. But considering the amount of stimulus, I'm not sure it was as effective as it could have been.
FDR was confronted with the same dilema, his opponents, some in his administration, and even Roosevelt himself were concerned about the massive government intervention taking place. And during his second administration, some of FDR's New Deal initiatives were denied and by 1937 the recovery slipped into another decline therby making it a "double-dip" depression. This is what concerns me currently, because if we cut back on stimulus and unemployment compensation, the same decline can occur. When debating stimulus, this gamble must be recognized.
Like you, I believe it is the private sector that will ultimately lead us out of the recession. But at the same time, I believe the Federal Government must use the tools it has to minimize the downturn in the economic cycle.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
"if we cut back on stimulus and unemployment compensation, the same decline can occur."
My belief is that decline is going to happen no matter what. Stimulus spending can only delay it, but by doing so it will make it much worse when it happens. I think my metaphor is apt: it's like giving an exhausted person caffeine. It may mask the problems for a short while, but the eventual crash will only be that much the worse. The economy needs to get healthy, and that means letting the malinvestments be liquidated. In regular terms that means letting businesses fail that should. If we prop them up, bail them out, stimulate the economy to keep them going, all that does is put off their eventual failure. In the meantime they consume resources, capital and labor that could go towards better investments. Hence those resourcs are wasted.
Stimulus spending cannot prevent the depression, it can only delay it. The longer we try to keep this up, the more in debt our country becomes. In the end, if they continue trying to delay it with more stimulus spending, it'll lead to hyperinflation or a massive depression that could last for over a decade.
We can get the pain over with now easier and quicker, or we can delay and make it more painful and take longer to recover. Unfortunately for us, politicians facing reelection will choose to delay.
snap_pop_no_crackle (anonymous) says…
See also:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/15...
tange (anonymous) replies…
See Oslo.
Boston_Corbett (anonymous) replies…
Ahhhh, without those orange signs, I wouldn't have known how to get to Johnnies, home of the 3 million dollar intersection.
vertigo (Jesse Crittenden) says…
Just curious... what government spending would you eliminate?
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
Bring all the troops home, end both the wars and close down all the overseas bases. Cancel the stimulus and TARP, whatever hasn't been spent. Cancel Obamacare. Then a 40% cut across the board to all other discretionary spending to start with. Reform entitlement programs to provide for those currently relying on them but leading to an eventual phase-out.
vertigo (Jesse Crittenden) replies…
Close down all overseas bases. Sorry Taiwan and S. Korea, even though you spend billions buying arms from u.s. manufacturers were going to let countries that don't buy our arms take you over. Sucks for those in the arms manufacturing sectors. Guess major unemployment is in the future for you folks. I'm sure that will be good for the economy.
While I say that u.s. overseas bases can be cut and consolidated eliminating them all is very naive. A major portion of our defense lies in the fact that we have overseas bases.
Obamacare spending wasn't in place prior to the recession spending... and hasn't really kicked in yet, so eliminating that doesn't cause a dent in today's budget.
How do you reconcile those that have paid into these entitlement programs that now will no longer see a benefit from it if phased out entirely?
tuschkahouma (anonymous) says…
I've read the wrecking crew book about how the GOP works through deregulation and
legislation to strip away policing powers of any agency i.e epa, sec, Interior, Justice
Dept., to make sure that the BIG MOney powers who lobby the GOP get way they lobby for.
Not only does big business get away with derivatives and deepwater horizon and no bid contracts, but the GOP gets to claim to the rural uneducated weary of washington masses
that Big Government doesn't work. I've had this arguement in the past over the Great Society
with my tea partier ex-grandfather who'd never admit that his party claims big government
doesn't work while the GOP is dismantling it for the state's rights anti-minority big business
plantation barons who still depend on cheap labor in the south to get wealthy from ( Shelby
Sessions, Barbour). That's the lovely schzophrenia politically of the GOP that comes
from behind the curtains and always fools the rural voters. With all of this in mind
as Obama entered office, it's a miracle we've come this far. The GOP didn't want anyone
to fix this mess. This mess is part of their plan to wreck the federal government.
To overcome the GOP's intentional economic destruction to this point is something else.
Too bad many of the dumblicans are still drinking the federal government destruction
Kool-Aid and calling the stimulus a failure only because it stopped their whole
end of the world prophecy for the godlican part of the GOP constituency.
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
Who are you talking about? I'm a Libertarian. The GOP and the dems differ on many issues, but on government spending it's only a matter of who gets the money, not how much. The republicans have no problems spending money on making war. It's funny that you suggest the republicans want to wreck the federal government. They have ALWAYS been the party of Big Government, going back to Lincoln. The dems used to be for small government but that changed after Cleveland. The republicans may talk about being for free markets and small government, but just look at the policies of people like Reagan and Bush: enormous amounts of spending and an increase in the size of government. The republican stimulus bills in '02 and '03 were just as much failures as the dems--but they don't match for the size.
It's fine to criticize the republicans, but to act like this is only one party's fault looks highly paritsan and shows a lack of paying attention.
tuschkahouma (anonymous) says…
here's a neat question libertarian. You all are for smaller government right?
your beloved country was actually the country of about 700 or so indigenous naitons.
Through nefarious treaties and outright theft and the abolishment of the treaty process
in 1871 and the sovereign yet dependant clause of John Marshall, this government
has a treaty trust relationship with 572 nations bands and tribes. Small government
Gop tried to terminate recognition of tribes between 1953 and 1971. President Nixon
repudiated termination and tribes recognition was restored. If you all and the GOP
are for smaller or no government, whose responsible for the payments for land
stolen or taken with a smaller government philosophy? Do you all become
historically disconnected to avoid culpability or do you man up and include
fiduciary responsibliity for tribal land compensation in your smaller government
or do you leave and give the land back?
Liberty_One (anonymous) replies…
The GOP is not for smaller government. They talk about it, but just look at Bush and Reagan and you'll see it isn't true.
As far as the treatment of Native Americans go, the government has been terrible. More Native Americans were killed from 1860-1895 by the US Army then people were killed in the Holocaust. Is that what you want? Big government that kills people and takes their land to give it to railroads?
The government subsidized railroads wouldn't negotiate with Native Americans for their land, they'd just call in the government to steal it for them and kill or run off the owners; anyone who got in their way--white, black, native americans, it didn't matter. There was, however, one railroad that was built entirely with private money. The Great Northern Railway was built by capitalist James Hill and he NEVER used violence to acquire land from Native Americans. He proudly boasted about the fact that he always purchased land for his railroad from the people that lived there, and if they refused to sell he just built it along a different route. That's what would happen under a libertarian system--peaceful exchanges of property for a voluntarily agreed upon price. And if the land owner was unwilling to sell they would never be forced to.
Government is about theft and violence. Free markets are about peaceful coexistence and voluntary exchange. The democrats and the republicans are two sides of the same coin. They'll both steal from the people and use force to get their way. Libertarians are completely different. Don't lump us in with them.
independant1 (anonymous) says…
I'm feeling stimulated. Ouch!!!
merrill (anonymous) says…
What about all of those USA flag waving corporations supporting the Communist government in China?
Instead of USA citizens in the USA?
merrill (anonymous) says…
How did the stimulus fail in Lawrence,Kansas?
How is bringing tax dollars home failing?
merrill (anonymous) says…
The Obama administration got stuck cleaning up after a previous president that cost taxpayers $11 trillion with a $1 trillion debt as icing on the cake.
NOW along with blowing $11 trillion tax dollars the previous administration left behind
about 11 million americans forced out of work through no fault of their own. It was the fault of the government.
" Often, government plays a role in bubbles. The housing bubble was in part generated by the Federal Reserve maintaining low interest rates. Easy money meant readily obtainable loans and, at least in the short run, low monthly payments. Also, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan denied the housing bubble’s existence—not fraud exactly, but deception that kept the bubble going. (Greenspan, whose view was ideologically driven, got support in his bubble denial from the academic work of the man who was to be his successor, Ben Bernanke.)
In addition, government regulatory agencies turned a blind eye to the highly risky practices of financial firms, practices that both encouraged the development of the bubble and made the impact all the worse when it burst. Moreover, the private rating agencies (e.g., Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s) were complicit. Dependent on the financial institutions for their fees, they gave excessively good ratings to these risky investments. Perhaps not fraud in the legal sense, but certainly misleading.
And, yes, substantial fraud was involved. For example, mortgage companies and banks used deceit to get people to take on mortgages when there was no possibility that the borrowers would be able to meet the payments. Not only was this fraud, but this fraud depended on government authorities ignoring their regulatory responsibilities.
So, no, a bubble and a Ponzi scheme are not the same. But they have elements in common. Usually, however, the losers in a Ponzi scheme are simply the direct investors, the schemer’s marks. A bubble like the housing bubble can wreak havoc on all of us."
Dollars and Sense
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Now what exactly does the repub party have in mind to restore 11 million jobs that went out the window under the watch of their regulatory jurisdiction that which was the Bush administration?
If tax breaks were the key to great paying new employment opportunities the USA would have a huge surplus of jobs no matter what.
Who exactly is going to employ the new 11 million unemployed?
rtpayton (anonymous) says…
Liberty One I agree that we need a much smaller government. I would suggest no more earmarks attached to bills. If a bill can't stand alone then don't pass it. Also, my wish would be lobbyist no longer be allowed to contact Senators of Representatives on any level of government.
vertigo (Jesse Crittenden) replies…
Now these are some suggestions I would back.