Sure. I may need to respond in two parts. Let me first tell you some reasons why I think it should not have been passed in the form it was.
In direct response to some of your points:
- Why are you citing the success of bailout funding? That was not part of the stimulus. I'm not debating the wisdom of TARP or son of TARP here. I was and am a believer in the necessary evil of bailing out the banks. GM, not so much.
- Your data showing job losses saddens me. Most estimates of job losses by the administration and other outlets have always been revised for the worst after the fact, and December was significantly worse than was expected. Furthermore, you and your source ignore two important facts. One: The estimates of job losses and a reverse in the pace of job losses WITHOUT a stimulus showed that experts expected it to slow organically, and 2) that the history of recessions in our country show that most stimulus packages are enacted when a recovery has already started. I'm not sure how your source can claim that Obama's stimulus can take credit for this when the WH's own estimate said that unemployment with the stimulus would be no higher than 8%. Second, most experts, even ones that support the stimulus, expected that job creation on the short term would affect longterm growth. What has happened is that job creation in the short term has been pretty flat, and worse than expected, and I expect with our debt load job growth longterm will STILL be affected negatively.
Here's a graph from the CBO on the longterm affect of the stimulus:
So my question to you is: If the WH said unemployment would not be worse than around 8%, and yet we're at 10+, AND we know the longterm effect of the stimulus is quite expensive... Then how the hell can you say the stimulus "worked"?
Here's the graph from the Obama WH:
It shows unemployment WITHOUT the stimulus was projected to be LOWER than what it is right now WITH the stimulus. So we know it has failed in that regard. It has. It has not stopped unemployment like they told us it would. Their goal, not mine. Yet we know that spending that much money will profoundly impact our debt longterm. How is this "working"?
MeasurablesUnemployment: The two real measurables that were communicated - the goals of the stimulus, were around creating jobs. We were told that unemployment would cap be in the 8% range, and here we are at 10%. If you add numbers to include underemployment, the number is pretty scary. For a trillion dollars, I expect more progress, sooner.
U.S. Job Losses in December Dim Hopes for Quick Upswing
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/busin ... 9jobs.htmlJobs created: Second, they established a bogus metric of "jobs created or saved". They've since moved away to a metric that's even more bogus and can include jobs that existed before and will exist after stimulus dollars fund a program.
Here's a depressing graph.
(source:
http://michaelscomments.wordpress.com/2 ... ment-news/)
The rate is not slowing. What is happening is that there are a significant amount of people who are giving up looking for jobs that were anything like what they had before and either going unemployed or taking worse / part-time jobs.
Furthermore, the AP and other outlets say that we should expect another year of high unemployment.
(source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100108/ap_ ... us_economy)
Here's another scary metric from that article: "The 85,000 lost jobs for the month is based on a government survey of employers. A separate government survey of households found a much darker picture — nearly 600,000 fewer people said they had jobs in December than in November.
.snip.
It was the second straight month the unemployment rate came in at 10 percent. The only reason it didn't rise was that 661,000 people stopped looking for jobs and left the work force. "
Rate of adoption: I read a story the other day that one of the programs they enacted, to stem foreclosures and work towards fixing the huge foreclosure problem, hadn't even been started. Why do we need a stimulus that reached into 10 years? Why didn't we have a smaller stimulus that does what they said it would do? Shock the economy, get jobs created, and cap it at 2-3 years so that we're not obligating ourselves for years to come.
Fraud, waste and tracking problems on recovery.gov: Who knows what the total amount of money we're being defrauded on, but it's in the billions of dollars - many billions of dollars. The amount of waste in this bill and the fact that Recovery.gov shows money being passed to districts that don't even exist in our country points to a vast and inefficient system to distribute money. Did you know that some local governments actually hired people specifically to help get and distribute stimulus funds? That seems wasteful, cumbersome and not something that is temporary.
There are so many examples of the problems with their tracking it's truly alarming. Here's one:
http://newmexico.watchdog.org/2010/01/0 ... zip-codes/Temporary, targeted and timelyLarry Summers wrote an op-ed 2 years ago and described the criteria for the stimulus to be temporary, targeted and timely.
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/pub ... mulus.htmlIt's not timely because it doesn't take affect for several years violated the timely criteria.
It's not targeted to people most in need - I don't see how adding funding for thousands of pet projects helps the guy who just lost his home in foreclosure or his job.
It's not temporary because it funded a host of longterm government programs, facilities and infrastructure and the impact on the deficit has been *huge*.
Thus, it violated the criteria of its own creators.
Biased towards government programsHave you seen some of the charts that show government worker pay rates compared to the rising unemployment in the private sector? While the private sector has been shedding jobs and getting lean, pay raises are almost double if you're in a government job. Why? Isn't it grossly inefficient to to use taxpayer money to inflate the pay of existing employees?
There was a really wonderful graph that showed this disparity and I can't find it now.
In a similar vein to the health care bill - if we're supposed to be stimulating the economy, why are there so many special interest groups receiving money? Why are there so many pork projects for local congressmembers? Make a smaller bill that does what we need and is short-term enough for us to get the fuck out of when the economy is turned around.
Shovel-ready projects?This is just a flat out lie. There are many, many projects that are simply not even off the ground yet.
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Having said all that, I'm going to hit post before my browser crashed. Bottom line to me is that I think a stimulus should have been enacted. I think it should have been about a quarter of the size, that no pork should have been put in, and it should have met the 3 criteria that Obama's own economic advisers recommended.
I apologize for any typos, I'm pretty tired.