But if you have read Paul Krugman's column for today, you might come away with the impression that this stimulus bill is far too little to make a difference. Here are the first few lines, I suggest that you go read the rest:
A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.The aid to state and local governments is vitally important, but the economic dunderheads in the party of Hoover do not understand that. State and local governments do not have the ability to run deficits, they cannot print money. So they are all cutting services and laying off people. If we are going to recover any time soon, job losses have to be stopped and yes, that includes not laying off government workers, cops, firefighters and teachers.It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.
Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.
It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in.
This is going to get a lot messier. Just as in fighting a war, no plan survives contact with the events to unfold. The Federal government is going to have to be flexible and change its strategy and tactics for stopping the slide into a deflationary spiral, but it will fail if the ideological purists in the party of Hoover keep throwing up roadblocks.
The party of Hoover will, just like it did at the end of the 1920s, cling to its economic ideology in spite of a worsening situation. They indeed will make things worse because of their clinging to their failed ideas.
We are all so screwed.
2 comments:
Just kill the income tax. That'll do it.
Ron Paul looked like a damned nut job a year ago when he said it, but today we're talking about dumping at least $1.75 trillion into loans, stimulus packages, and tax cuts. Cutting the income tax would slash the federal coffers by $2.1 trillion but it'd also free up people to actually do something productive rather than monitor our damned income all the time.
If you want to stimulate the economy then stop taxing the benefits of people that directly stimulate the economy!
Justin, I make a very, very good salary, probably more per year than you earn in a five-year period if you earn an average salary for your state, because I am very, very good at what I do, hold several patents, published articles in the field, yada yada yada. You know what? I don't care whether I'm taxed 27%, 33%, or 50%. I'll still do what I do, because I enjoy it and I'm paid a ridiculous amount of money to do it even *if* the government took half of it.
I don't drive a Mercedes or BMW, I drive an inexpensive Jeep. I don't ride a $20,000 Harley or BMW motorcycle, I ride a used Kawasaki that I bought for $2,800. I simply don't *need* that much money, and if the government needs some of that money to employ other people, it's not going to cause me to work any less hard or invent any fewer new inventions because, well, that's not why I do what I do. I do what I do because I like to do it and I'm good at it and it pays me enough to keep me in herring and ice cubes, anything beyond that is sashimi. I feel sad for people like you who hate your life and hate your job so much that the only thing that makes you go to work in the morning is the fact that you will get paid. It must be a miserable existence...
- Badtux the Well-employed Penguin
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