The link you provided in response to my point dates to Jan 2009, the same month Obama entered office.
I provided the following links regarding your claim that the vast majority of economists support the stimulus:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/ ... 9532.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/ ... 9532.shtml
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/economis ... -stimulus/
http://www.speaker.gov/UploadedFiles/Bo ... 3-11-1.pdf
The sources span early 2009 to just a couple of months ago. Your claim has no empirical basis, period, and as it is nothing more than an
argumentum ad populum, it carries no evidential or logical weight.
Only those from the far Right with the same ideological agenda.
Which is to say, only those on the Left with the same ideological agenda support others on the Left, which is a monumental triviality.
They like him because he does their bidding. But nothing changes the fact that Analytics and I refuted his nonsense. He said government cannot create wealth, and then he was forced to take that back.
What Sowell said was that under certain narrow, specific conditions, government can be said, in some sense, to create wealth. What were those specific conditions Kevin?
He said the CRA was a primary cause of the housing boom, and since then virtually every expert on the subject had refuted that with all the available evidence to the contrary.
Well, once again, bare assertion, supported by no evidence or logical argument, passes for critical thought. The CRA was a primary precipitating cause of the economic meltdown, among a number of causes, some of long duration, and all centered in Leftist government policy, of which the entire "affordable housing" body of programs and policies, including the CRA, were an important part of the straw that broke the camel's back.
My link detailed this, and all you did was keep appealing to his authority, as if he ever had any to begin with.
Why is it every time I follow your links and read what they have to say, they don't comport well with what you claim for them, or, when they do, we see that the sources themselves are deeply suspect?
Media Matters does not pretend to be a News organization relying on fair and balanced reporting. MM for America researches claims made by the Right and shows why they are wrong. This isn't rocket science. FOX News is terrified of them, and for good reason. It is why they absolutely refuse to debate the points they made, nor will they ever allow a debate to take place on their show.
Media Matters has substantial ties to Soros associated or funded affiliates, including MoveOn.org, The Center for American Progress, and the New Democratic Network, not to mention the Democracy Alliance, a consortium of some 100 of the nations wealthiest left-wing financiers who's mission is to fund leftist think tanks and partisan propaganda websites such as Media Matters, which as of the present, has received at least 7 million from DA.
In other words, people who have money, on the Left or Right, fund people who agree with them.
Try stating something that isn't trivial when you aren't stating something that's banal.
More than a million private sector jobs were created last year alone.
Your sources make this claim, but provide no data or references in support. But let's assume this is correct. As we are speaking here of the use of government money, specifically, phantom money created out of thin air and injected into the economy through the central banks as low interest loans, grants, and wages/salaries (as opposed to private money created through previous productive economic activity, part of which is then reinvested in the expansion of existing activity or in new business ventures) in what sense can such private sector job creation be said to be really private sector, and as
no new net wealth creation takes place in such a circular, closed economic structure, in what sense can there be said to be any real benefit to the economy as a whole, and in the long term, especially as the side effects of such government money creation and dissemination - spiraling inflation and catastrophic government debt - begin bearing down on that very same economy?
So suddenly private sector jobs aren't private sector jobs if the employees are unionized?
The vast majority of union jobs saved or created have been in the public sector among public sector unions, which now represent around 40% of all unionized workers. The problem here is that virtually the entire stimulus is a political slush fund to politically reliable constituencies, who have received the vast lion's share of the money.
As you many have noticed, the longstanding rapacious union demands regarding pay, benefits, and especially pensions was a major aspect of the meltdown of GM and Chriysler, and public sector employees per se are already a net drain on the national economy. Those workers produce nothing of any value that anyone desires to trade some of his medium of exchange for, and exist exclusively on the backs of the productive sector.
Not that you've established your assertion that they are mostly unionized, it wouldn't matter anyway.
Well, as you like to say, yes, your an idiot. This is well established common knowledge, as a few minutes online doing your own homework would demonstrate, were you so inclined.
Your Right Wing hatred of the union folks is well noted.
Is it? Well imagine that...
How dare they try to bargain and negotiate for workers rights and decent wages. What a bunch of losers they must be. Those kinds of rights and privileges should be left to entreprenuers and CEOs only, right?
Leaving aside the nebulous concept of "workers rights," the free, competitive market is the source, and the only legitimate determinant, of wage rates and salary levels.
At least in a free, civilized society in which all are assumed to be equal under the law.
At least it is hovering -which is precisely what the stimulus intended to do - whereas under Bush it was dropping like a rock with no end in sight. The rate is at 8.8% which is essentially bringing it back down to what it was before Obama's policies ever took effect. That, by any definition of the term, is "positive progress."
That's right Kevin, lower the bar far enough and any policy can be considered to be a success.
There were 674,000 fewer private sector jobs at the end of Bush's term. You're referring to 1.8 million lost jobs without balancing that with the jobs gained. Jobs are constantly being lost all the time. All you're doing is adding them up without incorporating the jobs added. The result is that there are more private sector workers since Obama has been elected.
Graham, 3.3 million jobs lost by the end of 2009, and 1.8 private sector jobs at the end of the plan's first two years. Those are the hard, empirical facts. The question still remains, what jobs have been gained and can those jobs be considered
real jobs; can they be considered actual net gains to the economy as a whole, or just net gains to specific, targeted sectors of the economy
at the expense of the economy as a whole?in other words, is this really
economic growth?but the fact is Bush pushed the economy over a cliff
Bush and the Republican congress, especially in his second term, did his fair share in helping to push it over that cliff, but this statement, as it stands, is deeply misleading. Other forces were at work, including the CRA and its effects on almost the entire mortgage lending industry, Fannie and Freddie, the bundling of hundreds of billions in toxic paper and the spreading of it throughout the economy, and our entire debt, inflation, anti-savings, spending obsessed monetary and fiscal policy.
What really pisses you guys off so much is the fact that the stimulus did precisely what it was expected to do. In short, the Keynesian plan worked, as it did during the Great Depression.
The New Deal caused and maintained the "Great Depression" Kevin. You are
far too unread and uninformed on the relevant scholarship and analysis here to be wading even into the baby pool on this issue.
The world's authority on Depressions, Ben Bernanke - a conservative economist no less - is the one who led the charge in that direction.
Enough comic relief. Bernake is not the world's authority on any economic issue, nor can he remotely be conceived as a movement conservative intellectual.
This is why you will forever be considered an idiot. No one who knows anything about economics will say, with a straight face, that the economic nosedive that had taken place under Bush, leveled off by a miracle, despite the "socialistic" policies that were implemented by Obama.
The economy didn't take a nosedive under Bush. It began a clear and precipitous decline while Bush was in the White House, and Bush did help, in some ways, in pushing it in that direction. But the actual nosedive, precipitated by the collapse of the mortgage lending industry due to wholly non-rational, uneconomic, politically motivated economic policy in this area, the implosion of several major auto makers due to unsustainable union rapaciousness, especially in the area of pension liabilities, and wild, out of control government spending and catastrophic debt creation, hit the fan just as Bush left office. All Obama has done is turn a fire hose pumping high octane gasoline on an already ferocious brush fire.
All you can do really is complain because they recovery isn't going fast enough. Well, is going as fast as can be expected.
What recovery? The tiny hints of recovery that exist can neither be explained by the stimulus program or be considered as signs of long term trends. We don't know what is going to happen, except that the entire economy is heading toward unambiguous collapse in a titanic mountain of debt composed of phantom money that didn't even exist before the Fed created it and handed it to the government.
You do not want to accept just how bad it was before he took over.
I already have, many times, going all the way back to Roosevelt and, before him, Hoover.
You're avoiding unemployment rates, for a reason. Do you really think anyone here is so stupid to not know what you're trying to do here? It is dishonest to say the least. Unemployment rates leveled off in November and December of 2009.
They may have, in those two arbitrarily chosen months. However:
Look at the almost vertical climb of the unemployment rate since 2009. Its now 2011 Kevin, not December 2009.
