Virtually everyone in the field of economics disagrees, except for a minority who generally hail from the Right/Center-Right.
This teenage-like retreat to argument by authority, which is perhaps Kevin's favorite technique as soon as he realizes he has no logical arguments or evidence to present in support of his claims, probably takes a back seat only to his cries of "idiot," "stupid," and "moron" as his favorite polemical standards.
In point of fact, numerous economists find the whole long discredited Keynesian "stimulus" argument fallacious. When even the Clinton Broadcasting System feels it has to report on the dissent, one knows something is the pot is bubbling to he surface.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/ ... 9532.shtmlGraham's claim here is
pure bluster. In point of fact, the standard academic/government/media iron triangle of ideological orthodoxy only appears to be "mainstream" because these views are mainstream
within it and it controls and mediates most of the popular political discourse within the nation, as it manipulates and gatekeeps the construction and dissemination of "news." Within the Ruling Class and the atmosphere of groupthink that permeates so much of its institutions (academia, the foundations, the mainstream media and government generally), Keynesian and socialist/progressive doctrines are unquestioned articles of faith.
The conservative and libertarian dismantling of Keynesian "stimulus" (which is really nothing more nor less then economic and political stimulus of government and its dependent constituencies), like that of Marxism, was complete generations ago, and nothing our modern feverish pitchfork wavers can say can ever bring the rotting corpse back to life. The Obama "stimulus" is, truth be told, nothing more than a pretext for the permanent and massive expansion of government, and the jobs that have been preserved up to now, primarily heavily unionized government employees, public school teachers, community organizers and activist groups (such as ACORN) have no more stimulative effect on the general economy than does breaking windows to provide jobs for glaziers.
I could launch into a monograph length evisceration of the economy killing, wealth wasting and destroying, and freedom suffocating "stimulus" so loved by statists and power mongers everywhere, but the hour is late and I've better things to do than go over this yet again for people who are neither open to rational discourse or capable of education.
In total contradistinction to Kevin's evidenceless assertion, CATO published this full page add in teh NYT:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/ ... 9532.shtmlhttp://www.cato-at-liberty.org/economis ... -stimulus/But wait, there's more:
http://www.speaker.gov/UploadedFiles/Bo ... 3-11-1.pdfThen again, we turn to one of the most prestigious and respected think tanks in the nation, The Heritage Foundation, for substantive critique:
http://blog.heritage.org/2009/09/04/mor ... -stimulus/http://www.heritage.org/Research/Testim ... lus-Failedhttp://www.heritage.org/Research/Commen ... n-Stimulushttp://www.hoover.org/publications/hoov ... ticle/5323http://www.hoover.org/news/daily-report/58641Well, as always, we could go on and on and on. Government spending to stimulate the economcy is a violation of fundametnal economic principles and elementary logic. None of the "jobs" created by such spending whether they are government employees hired or protected from layoffs (who were already a net drain on the economy in the first place) or private sector workers hired for public works projects which create no wealth (doing nothing more than shifting it from one place and one usage to another) and create no new net wealth in the economy and hence, no economic growth, have any net economic benefit, save to favored industries and constituency groups, who enjoy their windfall
at the expense of the rest of the economy and their fellow citizens.Every single penny of stimulus spending is either first taken out of the productive private sector economy through taxation, or, more likely, created out of thin air by the state. Sustained inflation, high unemployment, sagging job creation, and a shrinking economy (all of which have increased and expanded since the stimulus began) are what both theory and experience (FDR's turning of a what should have been a serious but short lived recession into the Great Depression through very much the same policies) demonstrate are to be expected from
Utterly insipid politically motivated economic boondoggles such as the ethanol mandate and the phantasm of "green" energy are the satisfying ideological outgrowths of the omnipresent, guiding, mailed hand of the caregiver state that has arisen in response to massive economic problems it itself was primarily responsible for creating.
Keynesian stimulus can never work (and never has) because its an entirely circular, closed loop within which money is taken from one part of the economy (or created out of thin air) and injected into another part. No wealth has been created here, but only shifted or reallocated according to non-market considerations. A bridge built with such stimulus money cannot be considered as the creation of wealth, and the construction jobs cannot be considered as real jobs, not because no work was done, and not because some piece of wealth (a bridge) did not appear somewhere, but because there is
no net economic gain here; the economy is no larger, no more expanded or increased, and no healthier than when the recession began. The money in the pockets of the construction workers has not been created by productive economic activity but simply reallocated to their pockets through redistributional economic activity.
Redistribution is not production. Shifting one pile of money from one place and one use to another
is not wealth creation.the money given to those construction workers as wages
is not new net wealth, but money either taken out of the pockets of their fellow citizens, or money created by debt and inflation and transferred to them as a paycheck.
The illusion is complete for the workers and their families.
Further, the fiscal stimuls was not designed to boost the economy so much as it was intended to save the economy from what was predicted by many to be an imminent collapse.
No immanent collapse was ever so much as remotely plausible. This is can't.
Folks on the Right will point out the negatives of our current economy and conclude the fiscal stimuls didn't work at all. But they refuse to see the larger picture in that the economy was in a complete free-fall at the time the Presidency was being handed over to Obama, and since the fiscal stimulus was enacted, the economy has essentially leveled off.
Hmmm...let's see. Obama promised the creation of 3.5 million new jobs through his stimulus program (as if 3.5 million new government jobs or private sector jobs funded by taxation or fiat money creation, both in direct conflict with the requirements of sustained real economic growth in the real world private sector economy, would actually stimulate much more than the economic welfare of the specific recipients of such funds and a few indirect, peripheral entities). What happened? 3.3 million jobs had been lost by the beginning of 2010. The unemployment rate was 7.7 percent in January of 2009, when The One was promulgating his stimulus plan. By 2010, the unemployment rate was 9.7% and was at nearly 9.8% as recently as November (the real rate of unemployment, when taking people who have quit looking for work are taken into consideration is around double the official number - depression era rates).
By now, most are aware that the entire stimulus is fundamentally a political payoff to the heavily moneyed Democratic constituency groups, foremost among them the big labor unions (and particularly, the government unions, which is really the last bastion of an otherwise fading, dinosaurian movement in the private sector).
The Obama stimulus, in other words, is a great, staggeringly expensive political money laundering operation. Its recipients and beneficiaries are content to have it this way, no doubt, but none of this is sustainable, either economically or morally.