I have mine.
I'm not a Jew or anything. 'Catholic' would be my religious affiliation if we were conducting a census, but still... Oy Vey! Set aside the absolutely atrocious economic performance of this country (if you're able) and just take stock of the situation as it stands.
Did we do nothing and ride out the storm, as the president's imaginary straw man opponents might have suggested if they actually existed? Nope. We went on the biggest borrowing and spending binge in the history of the world. And where exactly are we, two and a half years into this experiment? A ~35% increase in national debt and more unemployment than when we started?
Oy vey. That's pretty fucking bad.
I make no secret of my political views, but I am fairly versed in the world of economics. I begrudgingly acknowledge that government spending can generally be counted on to generate some economic growth. That being said - the myth of the Keynesian multiplier should be put to rest at this point. ARRA spending did in fact buoy growth over the last two years... in dollar figures that were LESS than the overall cost of the "stimulus" spending that took place. The "multiplier effect" doesn't exist and it never has. Show me a contradictory example and I'll buy you a beer. Reality is a real motherfucker.
The real effect has been that state and local governments used "Obama money" (as my brother's employers called it) to paper over their sad budgets for a while. And now here we are. The government sector is still out of money and all that "Obama money" has run out. In exchange for keeping unsustainable local budgets afloat for two years, we owe a few more trillions to the Chinamen, Russians, and Brazilians, and now we get to lay off the same workers who would have lost their jobs in the first place. Only now we're further in the hole and the debt is 35% larger. Awesome work, guys!
So - how exactly do you illustrate failure? I'll give it a shot. Some models suggest that the trillions in dollars may (or may not) have "saved or created" millions of jobs. So maybe all the spending was worth it, right? Yeah, maybe. Nobody can actually identify any of those "saved or created" jobs, but we have computer models that tell us a trillion bucks borrowed and spent must have achieved something. To paraphrase the author of this article though - We could have just identified all of the imaginary beneficiaries and cut each of them a check for $100,000. That would have covered the two years' worth of imaginary salaries that we "saved or created" and we'd be more than $400 billion ahead of where we are now. Mathematics sure do suck if you're a big spender.
Dollar cost is so declasse and arbitrary though, right? The dignity of the individual rises above the mind-blowing debt that has been incurred. So what if we're anal-raping future generations of Americans in order to buy votes today. At least we've made sure that people who want jobs can find them. At least we're taking bold steps to make sure we handle this recession better than others that came before. Err...
Oy motherfucking vey.
I can't wait to see what they do when they figure out what comes after 'trillion.'
I can't wait to see what they do when they figure out what comes after 'trillion.'
