For the record, I’m very impressed with our new president so far. His first actions in office – closing gitmo and setting a broad mandate for openness in government – are a bold and principled course-correction for a stumbling nation. And I am tickled pink to hear that Obama recently asked Scott McNealy to write a whitepaper on the benefits of Open Source software in government. But this bailout horseshit has got to stop. The economy will rebound regardless of how many hundreds of millions we do or don’t toss into random programs like birth control initiatives (is the family-planning sector really one of the hardest hit? No fooling?). All our elected representatives are arguing over is who gets to take credit for the recovery by pissing away the most taxpayer cash into the money hole.
Well..
I disagree a bit with their statement.. and I do think Keynes was pretty well justified by the Experience of the Great Depression.. (ONe can note that as soon as FDR started spending a lot, employment improved dramatically, as did GDP growth, but when the thought all was fixed and stopped spending to get back to a balanced budget after only three years in 1936–the economy promptly went into recession again… )
However.. I’m less for bailouts than for infrastructure spending.. and I’m all for reducing the debt. As someone who thinks Keynes was pretty smart–if not always right–I’m always quite pissed that people only mention what Keynes said to do when things were bad.. Basically, he said the gov’t should spend when there is a recession.. but that when things are going well, THEY SHOULD CUT SPENDING AND/OR RAISE ENOUGH TAXES TO GENERATE INCOME SO THEY CAN PAY OFF THE DEBTS THAT THEY HAD GENERATED.
No one–except for in the Early 1990’s under Bush I, seems to have taken this second part seriously..
For me–the talk about “it’s my money, so give me TAX CUTS NOW ALWAYS FOREVER” is not all that convincing.. but we’ve chatted about that before… In any case.. I always come back to the fact that we pay something like $500 billion/year in interest on the debt.. so.. if we could cut our debt in half, we could reduce our interest payments–and thus tax load by $250billion a year.. That would be progress.
So to conclude.. I’m not opposed to stimulus right now.. but I will be all for balancing the budget and generating surplusses dedicated towards reducing our debt when we do recover. If Obama can at least reduce our debt back to its Pre-Dubya level in these 8 years.. that would be totally awesome..
The gitmo thing is a political smokescreen and nothing more. Obama did not pardon or release the detainees. They were just moved. Somewhere else. Somewhere else the public doesn’t know about. I can’t believe no plucky journalist has gotten on this shit and tried to track the detainees.
Also, a wonderful way to start your administration is to kick poor women everywhere in the ovaries. Bravo, asshole.
And obviously, stimulus payments == stupid.