More Stimulants Please!!!
The Obama administration is still confusing weak economic signals with pleas of the children in Ovaltine commercials. Yesterday, the president announced a new round of stimulus spending targeted toward improving America’s ditch digging infrastructure. The president’s Labor Day speech calling on Congress to invest $50 billion in infrastructure projects is just the latest knot in a string of economic solutions coming from Martha’s Vineyard Washington. In addition to the Labor Day labor package, the Obama administration is also asking Congress to approve $200 billion in tax breaks for businesses, $50 billion in research and development tax credits, and $30 billion in loans for small businesses. The White House, however, is avoiding the politically toxic term “stimulus” and, as The Atlantic points out, is releasing this round of spending in spurts.
A couple thoughts about the Obama administration’s economic arguments:
1). The argument coming from the administration is that the Bush tax cuts are too expensive. Even Ozszag’s two-year extension is dismissed as not palpable. But while Obama maligns Bush’s tax cuts as fiscally unwise, the round of tax cuts and credits proposed by the administration is somehow affordable? This discourse is looking more like a game of “Cuts for your friends are bad, but cuts for my friends are awesome.” Without cutting spending, any tax cut is playing kick-the-can with our debt obligations.
2). Stimulus supporters insist the program was too small to achieve its lofty goals. Despite the little-man syndrome diagnosis, it seems peculiar that anyone who thinks the first stimulus was too small would support a second package that’s even smaller. If the first was too small, wouldn’t this second stimulus be even more useless in terms of helping the economy? I guess you take what you can get, especially since it’d be near impossible for Sisyphus Obama to get a large second stimulus past the Hill.
This seems as bad a post as the previous one seemed good.
The previous stimulus was not better because the goal was to shove money out the door. Infrastructure improvement can be a productive investment and business taxes are a break on economic activity as we all know.
Also, please can we have a moratorium on the double-standard perseveration. It makes anyone skeptical of the President’s agenda sound like petty whiners which a small minority of us are not, sometimes. I’m pretty sure The American Spectator satisfies an eternity’s worth of the whole world’s demand for bleating right wing opinion every single day.
The Democrats are simply all about process, and are flailing to find the magic button or soft spot to apply their extortions which they call “contributions.”
The Ponzi politics that the $50 billion Dear Leader Obama talked about in Milwaukee is transparently a bribe to unions—no non-union projects will receive any monies whatsoever. Pay off the thugs and the rest will wallow.
Democrats have one principle: “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.”
This half-baked tyro is turning out to be all smoke and mirrors. DL Obama has no substance and the Dem congress is going to evaporate like the committee hearings that were never held for the trillion-dollar [and counting] health care fiasco. And the monster Obamacare is so full of unconstitutional absurdities—buy health insurance or go to jail—that in the future he’ll be known as a biyotch POTUS.
Debt don’t matter/
This I know/
For Dick Cheney told me so.
Robert – good article.
daveinboca – good comments.
The $400 billion deficit of Bush’s last year included $350 billion given to Obama to spend however he wished.
Look for people who can’t tell a $50 billion deficit from a $1.5 trillion deficit, to give you folks some snark.
What I fear is that once in office, the porkmeisters of the repubs will return to their spendthrift ways, particularly in Pentagon spending increases. For me personally, this will be good, since my best paying consulting jobs are on DoD gigs. But for the country as a whole, the results will be terrible.
The fact that earmarks are not being ruled out is a bad sign.
“…the porkmeisters of the repubs will return to their spendthrift ways, particularly in Pentagon spending increases.”
Houston, we have a winner!