Nope, don’t think so.
Although I don’t think the stimulus package is overly harmful, it would have been better to not pass it than to give the government the opportunity to take credit for the recovery it has less than nothing to do with. This is what they’re saying now:
“We always knew we were not going to get all that much fiscal impact during the first five to six months. The big impact starts to hit from about now onwards,” Romer said.
How utterly convenient! The big impact of the stimulus coincides with the consensus economic recovery. I hope we don’t let them get away with that. So, they passed this stimulus super fast so it could help when the economy is already ramping up? This is always the problem with stimulus: the argument for it is to be counter-cyclical by having the government spend money in the troughs of the economy. What ends up happening is by the time any of it kicks in, the economy is already in an upswing, so the stimulus becomes pro-cyclical, making the peaks and troughs more extreme. It is political genius to continually change what the original intent was, thereby making you right in the end. I’m afraid there are many people out there who are ready to except this outcome at face value and there are so few who are willing and able to call the administration on it. We can’t let them fool us!
July 1, 2009 at 9:32 am |
You are optimistic.
How do you see this Cap and Trade bill fitting into the economic recovery?
July 1, 2009 at 11:31 am |
I am optimistic. So optimistic that I don’t think Cap and Trade will get past the Senate unless they nerf it so much as to make it almost inconsequential. They will have to delay the onset to the degree that there will be ample opportunity to either repeal it or create new technology (e.g. carbon sequestration) before it comes into force.
I am slightly less optimistic about Health Care “reform,” but according to Intrade, it only has a 35% chance of it passing this year, and the closer it gets to the 2010 elections, the harder it will be to pass either of these bills.
Even so, if the bills were passed, they wouldn’t do any real damage for years, so this current economic recovery will continue unabated for the next several years, whatever small consolation that would be.
And for the uninformed:
to nerf (verb, geek slang) – to weaken, water down, or dumb down (as in, to turn something into a Nerf toy.)
August 17, 2009 at 4:48 pm |
[...] the way of the dinosaurs. I predicted this would happen for Obama’s big goals in one of my comments on a previous post, where I also defined the term “nerf.” It sounds like they are [...]