US 'Economic Stimulus' Budget Review

[Lemur]

Now even the National Review is worthless?

Feel free to show me where I said that they were "worthless."

The article has a list of various programs and causes the money is going to, something I've not seen elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the source is purely partisan, so I would honestly need a corroborating source before I would accept their accounting. These are the same people who proudly cited a Congressional Budget Office report that turned out not to exist. That was a week ago. To quote St. Reagan, "Trust but verify."

As I said, they're very good at what they do, but what they do has nothing no bearing on trying to get at the truth of any subject. They exist to aid a particular side in politics. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's naive to treat them like a normal news source.

But instead of even daring to respond when the lead is a fiscally conservative viewpoint, you just launch some ad hominems and abandon the thread.

"Fiscally conservative"? Say wha? If NR were fiscally conservative, would they not have been so under the Bush Administration as well? And yet I remember them being rather muted about the trillion dollar yearly deficit developed under The Decider. That suggests that they are fiscal conservatives only when Democrats are in power. As I said, they are not about reaching any sort of truth, but rather about helping their side to win.

Ad hominem would mean that I'm attacking a person instead of an idea. How is it ad hominem to point out, accurately, that National Review is a purely partisan organ? Please explain.

As for the actual topic, the stimulus/pork bill, I find it a very hard subject to approach with a useful perspective. Obama is betting that Keynesian theories will put the brakes on the downward spiral, but in truth those theories have never been tested. So we're looking at a trillion-dollar gamble on an unproved economic theory. Also, the Congressional Dems have larded up the bill, which only serves to confuse the issue, and was strategically idiotic of them.

On the other hand, I don't hear any reasonable counter-proposal coming from any cohesive group. Republicans saying "tax cuts!" strike me as borderline ridiculous; perhaps if some economist could make a proper argument for their "tax cuts will solve anything" position, I'd understand it better.

Here's an interesting take from Bruce Bartlett:

The problem is that fiscal stimulus needs to be injected right now to counter the liquidity trap. If that were the case, I think we might well get a very high multiplier effect this year. But if much of the stimulus doesn't come online until next year, when we are likely to be past the worst of the slowdown, then crowding out will greatly diminish the effectiveness of the stimulus, just as the critics argue...

Thus the argument really boils down to a question of timing. In the short run, the case for stimulus is overwhelming. But in the longer run, we can't enrich ourselves by borrowing and printing money. That just causes inflation.

The trick is to front-load the stimulus as much as possible while putting in place policies that will tighten both fiscal and monetary policy next year.

How we actually accomplish that is way beyond my fiscal/economic understanding. But it certainly sounds reasonable.

As for this "we're robbing our children" outrage: I understand it, and I'm sympathetic to it, but where the **** were you people for the last eight years as a Republican president loaded us up with a yearly trillion-dollar deficit? Is it just me, or are you being freakishly selective?