Is Barack Hussien Obama purposely trying to destroy the US economy?

[seireikhaan]

Cut taxes to stimulate investment - capital spending and corporate income taxes. This and other measures to increase incentives to invest. I am skeptical of the benefits of income tax cuts to middle and lower class brackets.

Was not about 300 billion of the stimulus some form of tax cut?

Ensure credit in the banks by giving out the money with explicit contracts and guarantees from the banks that they would open the lines of credit.

Isn't that a bit... socialist?

I am unconvinced huge amounts of money spent by the government outside of this will do much good. It didn't in the US in the 30s or in Japan in the 90s. Of course, the lesson the Keynesians take from this always seems to be that we didn't spend enough. Though of course Japan did get out of the doldrums, and we are spending relatively significantly less than they did in the 90s, so I am scornful of their opinions, as is my wont.

Well, let's keep a few things in mind. First, some of FDR's first New Deal policies weren't actually Keynesian, but were undoubtedly a bad idea in retrospect- price locking, price floors, etc... Assuming, of course, that didn't somehow find itself into this bill. As for Japan's spending, I believe part of the problem was that the money often took ages to get through to the economy, such as roads that took 6 years to build and the like. As well, I seem to recall(though I could be wrong), that Japan actually started pulling itself out of its slump when it jacked the deficit up even higher than they already had. Now, is this causation, or just correlation?

I don't see why we need to rework our standard of living. As for 'too big to fail' - that's a myth. I believe the effects of trying to save dying companies are worse than simply letting them die. We should have let those lousy banks fail. Instead we spent hundreds of billions for nothing.

Amen.

However, I still approve of this particular stimulus bill, for a couple reasons. (with the giant caveat, if spending is done in a timely, efficient manner)

1) Infrastructure. I approve heartily of bettering the country's infrastructure, particularly energy grids and energy sources.
2) Tax cuts- even if temporary, the tax cuts are well needed.