Mother Jones - Comments for "Stimulus Details"

Ah Luther, you really are a Johnny one-note aren't you?

Heh heh. You should join the other rigid 'conservative' leaders competing to see who can be the best at "getting back to the past."

Heh heh. Unfortunately for you time's arrow points only one direction and even at the quantum level travel to the past is greatly limited.

Hey, I didn't make the rules, I just follow them.

My calculations also predict 3.6 million jobs over the next two years, but my analysis differs. I see either no result or negative result from the Obama stimulus, but growth resulting in 3.6 million jobs from the Bush tax cuts kicking in and trickle down from defense spending, where you get the biggest bang for the buck.

Any attempt to use the economic stimulus plan to solve social justice issues is just plain stupid. Just what one would expect from progressives.

supersaurus: I agree we need to dig ourselves out of this situation because we are here and can't change it. But very little is being done to address why we got here and to punish the people who ignored warnings and deliberately got us here. There are enough people in our country to spread between working on reacting to the problem and working on identifying and fixing the fundamental problems.

For example, how many people were punished for lying and taking us into the Iraq war? Those bad actors got what they wanted and the country had to scramble to react to the consequences of that malice. Now we have new problems elsewhere so we don't have the time and motivation to go back and punish the bad actors. The message is clear: You can get away with almost anything if you do it on a large enough scale. We keep getting ourselves into the same old problems because we hardly do anything to identify root causes and address them.

BC: I did not state anywhere that the stimulus jobs are the only ones that might be created, please confine your rebuttals to non-strawmen, however I am taking Obama at his word when he says 3.6 million jobs. this is not even enough to cover the net change in the workforce let alone the jobs that have recently been lost.

I cannot see how the net number of jobs created is "beside the point"...I thought that was what we were discussing.

don't get the idea I don't think the economy needs to be stimulated, rather I'm complaining about too much moderation in the stimulus package(s). better to aim high and scale back later than to aim low and fail in the restart. it wouldn't be difficult to adjust if suddenly we found too much money floating around, but people like krugman, i.e. real economists, don't seem to be worried about that side at all, rather they worry that the trickle won't do the job.

Obama says his stimulus plan will create 3.6 million jobs but he does not state that these are the only jobs that will be created by the economy. To look at that and say, as supersaurus does, that this only creates enough jobs for people entering the job market is really beside the point. Although the economy is dismal, there are new jobs being created, just not enough. So Obama is trying to use federal money to boost the number of jobs. And he's trying to create jobs that will be long lasting and for work that will be long lasting.

The tax cuts on businesses would certainly be helpful, especially on small businesses or businesses in sectors where there is potential for significant job creation.

really? in 1950 the effective corporate income tax rate ("effective rate" takes deductions and loopholes into account) was about 50%. in 2004 (latest numbers I could find) it was about 25%, see http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08950.pdf.

so we have a long history of cutting these rates, but if we do it just one more time then suddenly the magic will happen?

people like the WSJ editorial page like to complain about the high (40%) nominal rate, but that doesn't really matter since that isn't the real tax rate. try proposing to businesses that we cut the nominal rate to 30% but remove all the loopholes they have lobbied so hard to get over the last 50 years. don't forget the current corporate tax system is one corporate america bought and paid for.

rational: you misunderstand my use of the term "sunk cost". a sunk cost is one you can't recover or change by a proposed course of action, that doesn't mean the things that ran up the current national debt were necessarily good. one can argue about the errors that led to it until the cows come home, but none of that will change it, hence it is better to spend time arguing about how to get out of the current mess. you have to consider the fact of the current debt when planning of course, but the worthwhile question is "will this course of action make things better in the future" not "who screwed us in the past". of course that doesn't mean nobody can think about punishment, but that isn't really an economist's job.

Anything which purports to make this specific amount of predictions about large economies, I would think is bogus. But I may be wrong. Coming from a pure science field I just know how hard it is to get things right when there are only a few variables. I would hate to predict anything so chaotic as the number of jobs created by a government action.

Kevin, I challenge you to compare this prediction with the actual data when it comes out.

The job-creation numbers are impressive, but I hope the other details don't get lost in the discussion. I think we need the stimulus plan, and it needs to be very large, but Congress needs to make sure that it continues providing benefits in the long term, not just a shot in the arm for the short term.

The infrastructure spending will help keep the economy growing in the long term, but it would also be helpful if Congress could find a way to encourage businesses to invest in infrastructure as well. Possibly they could do this by making sure there are fewer unnecessary regulations that dissuade businesses from making those investments. There seem to be many businesses that have money to invest, but not as many that are actively investing in any forward-thinking enterprise. Hopefully Congress can find ways to get that money flowing.

The tax cuts on businesses would certainly be helpful, especially on small businesses or businesses in sectors where there is potential for significant job creation. We need the businesses like that to be able to resume their traditional role as the engine of our economy. The government can certainly assist the process getting started, but businesses will actually provide the growth.

I think the aid to the state governments is also needed, because the programs that the state governments support are needed for sustained growth. For instance, the state governments support schools and public workforce training programs. It is important to make sure both of those programs survive to make sure we are able to provide workers for whichever sectors of the economy are providing the jobs.

I recently saw that the Friends of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is working with Congress to make sure that they take these things into account when they are designing the stimulus package. They have a petition that I encourage everyone to sign to make sure Congress knows that we want the economy fixed - but we want it fixed for the long-term - http://www.friendsoftheuschamber.com/takeaction/index.cfm?ID=76

Before March 2003 several people pointed out that the Iraq war was unnecessary. Yet Bush dragged us through it and we later found out that the skeptics were very right. A responsible nation would have punished the people who took us through the Iraq war.

Same with this Credit crisis. The insanity of living on borrowed dime and the excesses surrounding lending and leverage were pointed out for several years. The nation ignored these skeptics, but now, after they were proven right, says "hey it is a sunk cost. Let's move on." That attitude guarantees us that we are focused on covering up our mistakes rather than learning from them.

What a wonderful country. People in power and wealth are allowed to rape and pillage the population in broad daylight. And the population tries very hard to ignore the pain in the orifices, and prepare to bend over again for more of the same.

Sorry for the visual, but that is how I feel about "sunk costs" because I know how everyone ignored warnings well before the costs were sunk.

We are stealing from our (grand)children to pay for our profligacy.

at the moment I think a lot of economists would argue that 1) whatever we've already stolen is a sunk cost so there is no use whining about that, and 2) what we are at least attempting to do is prevent a catastrophe much worse than raising the national debt.

we won't get to do the experiment since there is only one universe, but it seems likely that our grandchildren would be happier to read about a nasty recession in their pasts than to have lived through the tail end of a decade-long depression. yes, it is impossible to know the alternate paths, but there sure seem to be a lot of economists who are terrified about the present prospects if the government is unable to restart the motor.

rational: yes, thanks for the correction about net new job seekers, sloppy thinking on my part.

the fact that this number is largely ignored by the media is what allowed bush to get away with babbling about strong jobs creation so many times when in fact the net was negative.

rational,
According to the dictionary, "boffin" has been around since the early 1940s. Thanks Kevin for keeping it alive.

Dang, I ate some words. My question was: How long will these newly created jobs be around...