Government Stimulus Money: BILLIONS? TRILLIONS?

[Liveguy7]

DrGonzo, right now, with technology the way it is and computers the way they are and cars the way they are and so on and so forth, people will want to work to protect what we've worked so hard on.

Liveguy7
Exposed World

2012

[benji]

Uh...What?

[Oznogrd]

DrGonzo, right now, with technology the way it is and computers the way they are and cars the way they are and so on and so forth, people will want to work to protect what we've worked so hard on.

Liveguy7
Exposed World

2012

The car industry is toast, it got bailed out and japan pwns us.
All computer "jobs" other than some smaller organizations have been outsourced to India
And since when did technology mean we had money? Research and Development usually costs money.

[shadowgrin]

Heck, even Korea (Hyundai?) owns the US.

What happened to the concept of printing money? You can print money and create value through hard work over time...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency

[Liveguy7]

Let's just put it this way. The economy CANNOT crash. It just can't. That can't happen in this day and age.

Liveguy7
2012
Exposed World

[Oznogrd]

you stlll havent given a real reason why it "cant". It can and it will if nothing changes.

[benji]

During the Great Depression, 70-75% of people still had jobs.

[benji]

I'll re-answer this thread to bump it to better sell copies of our aspiring authors books.

We can't just print money. The greater the supply, the less it's worth. The only reason inflation hasn't exploded is because all the dollars the fed printed (almost 300% increase!) are not in the market. They're sitting in banks waiting for the bank runs.

When our money was backed with the idea that we could actually afford it, we could keep printing money. We can't do that anymore. We have $100 trillion dollars in short-term (i.e. before almost everyone these boards can retire) "mandatory" spending. This is $100 trillion of everyone in the country's money that has to be spent on a ponzi scheme. The current administration has announced that on top of this it will spend $1 trillion plus per year more than it gets back from citizens. And that's even with them assuming economic growth reaches historic levels and the rich will willingly pay higher rates. (And don't be fooled that any government program is ever temporary.)

The Great Depression resulted from a recession due to overproduction and underconsumption since World War I increased production capabilities while killing a lot of consumers. Then the governments got involved, inflated money, gave money from each other to each other to pay each others debts, seized control of markets and then got really pissed off and cut off global trade. Then we had a "great" depression. In a simple and far reduced description. The 1920s boom started a few years after The War when the world finally got back to life, the 1990s boom started after the "end of history" and then accelerated to absurd levels after welfare reform and the capital gains cut. (Which dropped billions into the market through free market mechanisms.) The 2000s were riding out the bubble and shifting stuff around (Bush to his credit attempted to throw a one-two punch like Clinton with the across the board tax cuts and Social Security reform, but screwed it up with NCLB/Part D/War/Gobs-of-useless-spending, and only got the first and only until the next Administration) in a way we couldn't have done in the 1930s in order to keep things afloat. (For one, there was piles more cash to move around to prop things up short-term.) Then the mortage market collapsed and there wasn't enough capital to maintain the entire market as well as bail it out.

The rest of the world will manage. They aren't tied to our past or politics. They can make a clean break and hitch a wagon on China and India to stay afloat. Even Europe which has spent the Post-War years destroying itself economically can survive individually because the structual problems are smaller. The leaders are probably all secretly cheering the failure of the EU's ascendence over nations. Japan already got battered with their collapse.

We're even more doomed as a Republic because this is not just economics, it's politics. It's over. The American Experiment is officially dead. Read the Federalist Papers, and then read descriptions of the Budget, TARP and the stimulus. And then realize that like all things Washington does in the post-Constitution era, those things are never going away. The only upside is that I'll get perverse pleasure from being right. (And if I'm wrong, things will be good, so I win either way, amirite?)

Like I poorly paraphrased: "Don't worry though, when we're all poor, we'll be easier to please."

And because I'm being a tl;dr jerk:

“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” — Rahm Emanuel

"Never waste a good crisis" - Hillary Clinton

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” —H.L. Mencken

Fine, Mencken is awesome, so one more:

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.” —H. L. Mencken

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” —H. L. Mencken

If someone calls me the next Mencken, I could die happy.

[Hoyasaxa]

Luckily, the US isn't a free market country.

Besides tax cuts and mortgage assistance, is there any other way to get the money in the hands of the people, instead of businesses?

This question makes no sense. If people are allowed to keep more of their money, they will spend some of it and save the rest (for most people in banks), so the money will go to businesses, who will give the money back to people as pay after investment. If the government takes money from some people and then uses it in a mortgage assistance program, it's going to businesses.

The government spending and tax credits aren't "stimulus" it's just another vote buying and lobbyist repayment program.

Don't worry though, when we're all poor, we'll be easier to please.

"government is the problem, not the solution"

<3 reagan

[benji]

You sir, are a scholar and gentleman.

[Liveguy7]

Does anyone know the status of the lastest stimulus bill that Obama passed? Is it helping? Is it putting people back to work or not???

[Oznogrd]

judging from what i saw yesterday at a local job fair...im guessing...no

[benji]

Does anyone know the status of the lastest stimulus bill that Obama passed? Is it helping? Is it putting people back to work or not???

Why would it? It had nothing to do with helping the economy or creating private sector jobs. Even if it did, a good amount of the spending doesn't even happen until 2010 and 2011.

It's about rushing through long wanted programs and funding, not about helping the economy. This is why nobody read it. This is why Obama broke with his campaign promise and refused to let citizen comment on it for five days. This is why they're running around throwing every distraction they can on the fire. Attacking Limbaugh/Cramer/AIG executives, riling up public hatred at these people. Declaring that if anyone is opposed to any single part of the legislation and doesn't vote for it, they want half a billion Americans to lose their jobs every day.

Sliding into a banana republic faster and faster.

[shadowgrin]

And the question of where to get all that money and how to recover the deficit it will create for future generations still remain unanswered.

Great going Obama.

Put money in banks so they will create more lending and stimualte the economy - lols.

[Liveguy7]

All we need to do is make the banks lend money again. I do, however, like the tax credit..that should help out real nice as well.

Exposed World

[benji]

No, it won't. Just like they didn't last year. They're improperly targeted and just move money around. And most importantly, they're temporary. A one time boost in sales doesn't create jobs or expand businesses.

The government needs to just fucking stop, let the market adjust to the new realities. Every week they are doing something new and absurd. Nobody knows what company or industry the government is going to seize next, or what group of people will get populist rage directed at them next. If you have no idea what could happen next week, are you going to hold onto your money and wait and see, or are you going to make a risky jump into an industry that may be part of the federal government tomorrow?

The more the government does, the worse things will get. It's the natural order of intervention.

They want to pay people to trade in their cars for new ones. They are going to be pushing a major energy policy change that will send prices skyrocketing and enact carbon tariffs butchering trade. They've already pissed off Mexico over 96 trucks in return for $3 billion in tariffs. Transportation has already enacted new punishing regulations on the auto industry. Oh, and they're attacking charity for standing in the way of government.

Sinking ship.

[NovU]

The government needs to just fucking stop, let the market adjust to the new realities. Every week they are doing something new and absurd.

That's something I really agree on. For an example, they implemented so many new policies and plans to save real estate market, but ended up just postponing the crash and spending more budget. If they're going to do something about anything, they better come up with a clear plan that will be beneficial for a long term.

[benji]

They can't, and they won't. This is about using a crisis to pass a lot of long wanted programs instead of doing anything for actual recovery. This is what government does. (See: Act, Patriot. Deal, New.)

These programs may have benefits, may be good ones to enact, and some of them might even be constitutional, I'm sure they believe this for all of them, but none of them have anything to do with economic recovery. The Obama team doesn't have complete idiots on it, they know the "fundamentals of the economy are strong" which is why he joined McCain is saying it. They mean that people produce things and consume things still because we need food and TV and stuff. They know with a stable market, the correction would smooth itself out even if growth stagnates, the contraction will end.

The problem is, if they let things take their own course, they're losing an opportunity to enact things they've spent the last two decades wanting or making radical changes they want in industries. If they do actual free market promotion instead of worthless one-time rebates or conditional credits while rolling back Clinton's free market reforms, that will be less money later when they want to enact even more programs. If they back off, and the market stabilizes resulting in a visible recovery, then it's a lot harder than "OMG EVERYTHING IS SEEMINGLY SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL WE HAVE TO DO WHATEVER WE WANT" to justify further intervention or massive structual changes. If the government backs off and lets the market correct, it'll lose the opportunity to politically direct the economy further and reward interests as easily.

They're doing just enough to try to soften the blow of the correction on the upper levels of the economy so they can continue the Bush-era practice of pushing the needed reform down the road delaying the epic entitlement collapse. Unlike Reagan-Clinton policy they aren't just pushing the entitlement reform down the road a few years, while making a number of key free market reforms, the Bush-Obama policy is to push this down the road while piling massive new amounts of debt on top of it.

[cyanide]

That reminds me.

I watched a documentary a few weeks ago on the current financial state of the US, and the documentary argued that gov't intervention was a good thing to stimulate the economy instead of allowing the market cause another great depression. I'm against government intervention, but that was an interesting argument they raised to prevent a catastrophe to happen again.

[benji]

Government caused the Great Depression to be Great. Just like it caused this one. (See above, as you have now.)

Statists operate from the position that if government has failed or screwed something up, the problem was not enough government. Really, if anything fails, the problem wasn't enough political control over it.

What profit is there for the political class in letting the market operate unfettered? They might have to get real jobs.