WI: Larger Stimulus passed in 2009

Jeb: America's Next Bush, Ch. 9 "Who Wants To Know?," S. V. Dáte, Penguin Publishing, 2007.

https://books.google.com/books?id=v...ress office was usually on the phone"&f=false

' . . . Jeb's press office was usually on the phone to the AP by early morning the day a damaging article had run in one of the state's daily newspapers, asking that it not be picked up. They would sometimes call other newspapers, too, in the event reporters were considering following up on the story by themselves, without waiting for the AP. Sometimes they would offer one-on-one interview time with Jeb in return. Far, far too often, their offers of these little trades paid off. . . '
So, AP sold their journalistic soul for “access.” And this is just for punsy matters in the state of Florida.

The author is a newspaper man for one of the major Florida dailies.

Okay, what’s to be done, and this is something I’ve thought about some, I think you’ve got to take what is typically the best journalism which is sports or medical topics and build from there.
 
Well, in my life assorted doctors have declared me suffering from Neural Motor Retardation, Dyslexia, Ausbergers, & whatever the maladly du jour might be. So I guess I qualify in that regard. . .
Thanks for sharing! :)

I’m reasonably sure I’m somewhere on the Aspergers-Autism Spectrum myself. No, I’ve never been formally diagnosed and people my age, I’m 55, are going to tend not to be. And if in some final analysis I’m merely ‘spectrum-lite’ or ‘spectrum-friendly’ as it were, that’s perfectly okay, too.

One thing professionals such as psychologists and psychiatrists don’t talk about all that much are sensory issues. But on an autism board I sometimes participate on, it’s something we discuss on a fairly regular basis.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
And compare this to the period from 1945 to approximately 1970 when the U.S. middle class was growing and people felt the future was open and positive. I mean, those magic 25 years or so!

PS if we invent journalism, which I feel we have to, we won’t need lynch mobs

Journalism is only effective if

1) the people care
2) they are motivated to take action
3) there is a clear and unbiased system for redress


A lynchmob works no matter what, and it makes the next guy too scared to fuck around, lest he fall to mob justice.

Frankly I've always felt that those put in power should be made to feel terrified as a matter of course.
 
To me, that just plays into the narrative the corporate-state wants to run. I mean, look at the Standing Rock Sioux protest mainly in 2016 against the Keystone pipeline. The activists were doubly right, the pipeline was a bad deal on environmental grounds, plus out of respect for Native Americans.

All these creative people, but no, the governor of North Dakota wanted to characterize it as bad. And this shit will become more common as we drift into becoming a third world nation. Okay, alright, some grounds for optimism, but not on the front of middle-class jobs. And I for one do not believe STEM is the savior of the human race.

I think most of all we probably need to study labor union successes from U.S. history. Plus, other social justice successes.

And economics very damn boring, but very damn important. In time, we need to experiment with ways of teaching each other and making it interesting.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Journalism is only effective if

1) the people care
2) they are motivated to take action
3) there is a clear and unbiased system for redress


A lynchmob works no matter what, and it makes the next guy too scared to fuck around, lest he fall to mob justice.

Frankly I've always felt that those put in power should be made to feel terrified as a matter of course.
Well there is always voting the bastard out. Keep blood from getting in the rug.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
To me, that just plays into the narrative the corporate-state wants to run. I mean, look at the Standing Rock Sioux protest mainly in 2016 against the Keystone pipeline. The activists were doubly right, the pipeline was a bad deal on environmental grounds, plus out of respect for Native Americans.

All these creative people, but no, the governor of North Dakota wanted to characterize it as bad. And this shit will become more common as we drift into becoming a third world nation. Okay, alright, some grounds for optimism, but not on the front of middle-class jobs. And I for one do not believe STEM is the savior of the human race.

I think most of all we probably need to study labor union successes from U.S. history. Plus, other social justice successes.

And economics very damn boring, but very damn important. In time, we need to experiment with ways of teaching each other and making it interesting.

The thing though is that a lot of the union strikes and labor movements that brought us rights as workers were frequently quite violent.

Its not a matter of taking the moral high ground, it's about mobilizing human and political capital against an enemy social class.

It's become more difficult with the increased polarization, and dehumanization of political enemies, to pull from across the isle, but the moral high ground of the mainstream media remains something that is nice to have, but not a prerequisite for victory.

Frankly the whole system for resistance should be handled as a military campaign.


And I do think STEM will save us long term, as the planet begins to be used up, or natural climate change kicks in and collapses food chains. But not from capitalism.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
Well there is always voting the bastard out. Keep blood from getting in the rug.

And how well has that worked? We've been dealing with nearly unassailable walls of conservatism in the South and plains states for decades upon decades.

Look at the composition of the Republican congress. It does not change quickly no matter how much they put the screws to their constituents, because they've been blinded, and are content to remain blind.

The only way we'll topple them is either changing the system to be more democratic and equitable (see point three), or through direct confrontation and countering their power outside of their fortresses. In either case, the power has to be pried from their hands, the only difference is the tool used.
 

Wallet

Banned
Can we get back to discussing the benefits of a larger stimulus packages passed in 2009?

The very excellent timeline "Hope, Change, and Nutmeg" had a 1.7 trillion dollar package
 
The politics of a larger stimulus is difficult.

A lot of it is that frankly there just wasn't an appreciation yet for how bad the recession was getting. There's the oft attacked "Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" report from Obama's incoming economic council on the potential impact of the stimulus. It predicted between 3-4 million jobs being created by the end of 2010, with unemployment (with) the stimulus peaking just below 8 percent in 2009, and (without) peaking at 9 percent in 2010. Which was wrong. What occurred with the stimulus was unemployment peaking at 10 percent and not even getting blow 8 percent until the middle of 2012. We hadn't had a recession as deep or as long lasting as the Great Recession in a long time, and it showed it how the policy was crafted; anything over a trillion dollars was seen as being loony.

The other thing is that the bill relied a lot of some Republicans and more Conservative Democrats to back it. When it came up for a vote in February you had just 58 Democrats + Independents, which includes the likes of Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, and Max Baucus. Specter didn't switch to the Democrats until April, while Franken wasn't seated until July of that year due to the drama in Minnesota. What we got was, for the time, the largest we could have hoped for.

To change these I think you need an earlier recession, a bigger Democratic majority, or both. An earlier recession so by the time the election happens and the new administration is formulating its policy objectives there's a clearer understanding that this isn't going to be a normal downturn, and a bigger majority to allow Democrats to override concerns about the deficit or to focus on tax cuts.

As for impact. Hard to say? A lot depends on just how big it is. The original being in the $850B area, versus plausibly $1.2T, or $2T which is what we now think we probably needed. I don't think $1.2T changes much fundamentally. It helps, obviously, but you're talking changes along the margins. Perhaps unemployment doesn't hit 10 percent, peaks a bit sooner, and the recover takes hold quicker. Unemployment didn't really seem to start steadily going down until 2011; with a few extra hundred billion say that starts in 2010 and is more steady. I'd be cautious though since even with a $2 trillion stimulus I don't know how quickly or rapidly we could expect a 'full' recovery. We had experienced a severe financial crisis and skirted financial meltdown, there's not going to be an easy way to avoid the impacts of a deep recession, and the recovery will take time.

The other important question is what the money is being spent on and when. Some of the criticism of the original stimulus is that, for all the touting of shovel ready projects, there just wasn't much to spend on when job losses were at their most severe. This is highlighted in that, as far as I know, only about a fourth of the Stimulus' disbursements occurred in 2009. If you want to add another trillion to it, where to actually spend that sort of poses a challenge. More state aid, surely, but that's not worth a trillion even if you stretch it over a year or two more. You could do more with tax cuts or tax credits, but that offers a limited benefit to someone who has already lost their job. We could always spend more on infrastructure, but its not really suited for 'immediate' spending. Which is to say with a larger stimulus I think we need to get a lot more creative about how we want the money spent, and a lot more realistic about for how long we want the money spent.
 
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New Patomic gets to the question I had: what are we spending it on?

Hope/Change/Nutmeg had a spending breakdown of that $1.7 trillion package. I hope you don't mind if I forego the cumbersome quoting process and just use cut and paste and inverted commas:


"According to the White House, the stimulus is composed of [2]:

- $873 billion in infrastructure spending. Specifically, this is composed of:
-- $140 billion on modernizing and renovating the Northeast Corridor as a high-speed rail track
-- $37.5 billion on other Amtrak renovations and improvements
-- $182.5 billion on roads, bridges, airport, and shipyard improvements
-- $21.5 billion for projects improving the water and sewage systems, as well as environmental cleanup and public lands maintenance (including upkeep of the National Mall)
-- $10 billion for governmental buildings and facilities
-- $18.5 billion for communications, IT, and security improvements
-- $27 billion towards energy infrastructure: renovating the aging power grid, cleaning up radioactive waste, transmission upgrades, etc.
-- $39 billion towards energy efficiency and renewables infrastructure and research
-- $42 billion towards housing construction and tax incentives (including the well-publicized tax break for homeowners who weatherize their houses.)
-- $85 billion towards public health: research, hospital construction, and health information technology improvements
-- $195 billion for education: Tax breaks helping low-income children attend preschool, public university funding and increased tuition aid, as well as job training programs.
-- $59 billion for scientific research
-- $16 billion in other categories (including assistance for farmers, census preparation, etc.)
In addition to the aforementioned infrastructure investment, the stimulus will also consist of:

- $365 billion in fiscal relief for states (shoring up state budget holes, as well as aid for state Medicaid, local education, etc.)
- $157.5 billion for dramatically raising food stamp benefits and other welfare payments through 2016.
- $155 billion for raising and extending unemployment compensation benefits. The stimulus legislation permanently rewrites the old unemployment compensation laws, so that the size and duration of benefits are now tied to the official CBO-reported U3 unemployment rate, returning to the old level only when the unemployment rate is lower than 6%.
- $60 billion towards tax incentives for business
- $110 billion for individual tax incentives."
 
. . . Some of the criticism of the original stimulus is that, for all the touting of shovel ready projects, there just wasn't much to spend on when job losses were at their most severe. . .
This is what economist Paul Krugman has talked about, that you can't spend enough money on infrastructure fast enough to make that much of a difference in macroeconomic terms. Instead, I think he's in favor of things like temporarily reducing taxes AND withholding to get more money into people's hands right now, especially more modest income workers who are more likely to spend it. Also, money to the states so that states like New Jersey won't lay off fire fighters and teachers during the recession, like New Jersey did OTL.

In fact, average citizens so believe in infrastructure spending that if I were a politician or any type of formal or informal leader, I would undersell it. I would tell people, the actual results will be rather limited.
 
A larger stimulus would need bigger political buy in, meaning the Republicans. So make some of it tax cuts and throw in reduction in regulations on top of that; though clearly not any that apply to financial matters. Anything to help those so called shovel ready projects significantly more ready.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/how-the-stimulus-shaped-the-white-house/251823/



https://newrepublic.com/article/100961/memo-larry-summers-obama



https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/how-did-we-know-the-stimulus-was-too-small/



quote-in-the-history-of-the-world-no-one-has-ever-washed-a-rented-car-lawrence-summers-28-71-79.jpg

Larry Summers is an excellent economist, a brilliant political operative, and a motherfucking world class bully.

I remember a friend telling me in the late 90s, "Larry Summers (then Deputy Sec at Treasury) screamed at my mother yesterday."
 
Larry Summers is an excellent economist, a brilliant political operative, and a motherfucking world class bully.

I remember a friend telling me in the late 90s, "Larry Summers (then Deputy Sec at Treasury) screamed at my mother yesterday."

He's a first class ahole. But, I have a small soft spot for him for throwing shade at the Winklevi
 
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