The Republican "jobs bill" is no more a "jobs" bill than Obama's recently proposed plan.
The balanced-budget amendment is simply political gimmickry. In the first place, there's no way in hell it will pass. Even if it did pass, the federal budget is so fraught with phony accounting that no one would ever be likely to agree on what might constitute a "balanced budget." That would likely be decided by the courts. And what in the world would happen if we end up having to fight a justified war or respond to some other crisis? Would congress then have to go to the courts?
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Originally Posted by trynagetlaid
There's no way Republicans will come up with a jobs bill that works; their only interest is a HIGH unemployment number and MORE people out of work. Because that is probably the only way they can get Obama out of office next year.
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Essentally true.
Politics has become a very nasty game. But the practice of political gimmickry is not unique to either party. Obama must have known that his "jobs bill" has no chance. A number of Senate Democrats oppose it. But it's probably good politics. He can blame Republicans for blocking it and substantially increase his re-election chances by running against their intransigence.
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Originally Posted by TexTushHog
Dodd-Frank, as weak as it is, is the best hope of preventing another financial melt down like the one we just had.
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Dodd-Frank actually does very little to prevent another financial crisis. It does virtually nothing about Fannie and Freddie or TBTF. In fact, the TBTF banks are even bigger than ever. It should come as no surprise that immediately after details of the bill were released, the stocks of all the biggest ones went up, since provisions of the bill were far more "big bank-friendly" than had been previously thought. In my opinion, about all the bill did was create a dangerous complacency. The probability of another crisis within the next year or two is very high.
Another big problem is that it imposes heavy compliance costs on smaller community banks, which will have a hard time competing against institutions that can spread those costs across much larger asset bases.
While we're at it, I think we ought to fix or get rid of Sarbox and Gramm-Leach-Bliley.
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Originally Posted by TexTushHog
Had it not worked, we would have been in a depression, not a recession.
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If you believe that, you should take a look at when and how the money was actually spent, and the timeline of the inventory bounceback during the first half of 2009. Nothing in the way of sustained patterns of production were created by the stimulus spending, and virtually nothing else of any value at all. In my opinion, the opportunity was almost completely squandered and the net effect was that the ARRA is a net negative for the economy, since it produced little other than a lot of extra debt. It probably made the recession a little less bad in 2009 than it otherwise would have been -- after all, you can't pump out $860 billion and have it fail to produce some benefit somewhere. But I think that's about the happiest face you can put on it.
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Originally Posted by TexTushHog
And the fact that the first stimulus is winding down is why the economy is stalling and likely headed for a double dip recession.
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If that's the case, then the whole idea was faulty in the first place.
The idea promoted by Romer, Summers, Goolsbee, and others was that the spending would "prime the pump", as they said in the old days, or "kick start" the economy, and that then the private sector would take over. It clearly did not work. If the economy depends on sustaining "stimulus" spending of such quantity as to produce endless deficits in the neighborhood of 9% of GDP, then we're in far more trouble than most people realize. (But then, I've long said that I think we
are in far more trouble than most people think.)
Here's what I think is a very good explanation of why the stimulus package did not work:
http://www.thenation.com/article/163...ould-keynes-do
Tom Geoghegan is rather far to the left and I disagree with him on many things, but here he makes some very interesting points. You will see some very interesting food for thought. My essential point has long been that our economy faces some very serious structural issues, and that almost no one in the political arena is talking about them.
Instead, they're relying on what essentially amounts to the "faith-based" economics of large fiscal multipliers which do not work in the real world. We are trying to build an economic expansion built on a foundation of sand, which is exactly what we were doing for most of the '00s.
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Originally Posted by TexTushHog
Hell, even the big money investment banks are joining the call for stimulus spending.
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Of course; they always do.
The primary dealers get a little slice of Treasury issuance -- that's part of what these guys do for a living!
Republicans Propose Job Creation Bill
