Some across the board tax cuts or even possibly some targeted tax cuts may help, however, we are borrowing everything at this point or printing money. It very well could help in the short term but in the long term it will likely actually hurt more. In fact the CBO has scored the stimulus bill helping just a little in the first few years and then actually hurting our economy after that. This is coming from the gov’t itself. It is probably even worse then what they are projecting. Normally I am all for tax cuts, but if you are increasing spending at the same time you are decreasing taxes you are setting yourself up for future failure. I know that most other countries are doing the same thing we are to our currency, but they don’t have as much to lose. We are the reserve currency of the world. At some point othe countries may decide that isn’t working so well and the dollar is dropped as the reserve currency. If you think the economy is bad now, wait till that happens. We will be yearning for the times when we only had 7.5% unemployment and we could afford to worry about global warming.

Giving money to the states only will make them be even more fiscally imprudent in the future. Why be prudent with the money if the federal gov’t will always help us out. I don’t know if there are any provisions for having the states payback any of the money they are getting, but I doubt it. As far as I am concerned the state gov’ts could certainly cut back on the number of employees and probably should cut back. Look at how the incentives in the medicad program has drove up the spending by states in healthcare. The more they spend the more they get from the federal gov’t, ie taxpayers from other states. If I was a politician in a state and could get my money from taxpayers of other states or from my state, it wouldn’t be that difficutl of a choice. You are going to get as much as you can from everyone else before asking the people you are supposed to serve to pay.

Sure most of the spending is supposed to be temporary but have you ever heard of a gov’t program ending when it was supposed to. And even if it is temporary, we don’t have the money to spend. It will all be borrowed or created. Borrowing and living above our means is what got us into this problem. Doing more of the same will not get us out of it.

While I believe that we need to have infrastucture spending it should be done when economically we are in good shape and can do it with little to no borrowing. Education spending per child excluding capital spending has doubled in something like twenty-twenty five years after inflation is taken into account. Education should not be hurting for money, because they have been getting far more than anyone other industry save maybe health care for many years. They never make the hard choices because they know the gov’t/taxpayer will always give them more. What’s even worse is the quality has not improved and quite possibly it may have detoriated. Capital spending in education is the same way. They don’t do what they need to do to keep buildings maintained because that comes out of their operating budgets. They know at some point the taxpayer will be forced to build a new building or make huge improvements to current buildings outside of the normal operating budget.

You may be right on all fronts. I keep wondering if I am being duped. I think my brain may implode if I have to keep defending the policies of the Democrats, but here goes -

- Some targeted tax cuts are known to work as an ecomomic stimulus (think the 1920s, the JFK tax cuts, etc.)
- Giving money to the states (tempoarily) allows them to retain employees to keep unemployment from getting as bad.
- The great bulk of the new spending is supposed to be temporary (but I have yet to find a break down of this)
- Infrastructure spending and school spending was part of Obama’s plan anyway. So that was likely going to happen anyway - and it will give some stimulus after 2009.

Doing virtually nothing in the early 2000’s and in the early 80’s at least in regards to trying to spend our way out of a problem helped get us out of each recession very quickly. Nearly every time this has been tried, while we go through some short term pain, the economy comes out like gangbusters and grows at a rapid pace. I like the odds of this working better.

While this downturn could get worse and IMO with what the gov’t is doing it will almost assurdely get significantly worse, unemployment figures are still no worse than even in the early 90’s and in the early 80’s. We are no where near the level in the 30’s.

This whole bill just reaks of rewarding liberals special interest consitituency. Labor unions, check. gov’t employeess, check. education, check. environmental groups, check. national health care groups, check. and now big business, check. Small businesses, hosed. The american taxpayer, hosed. The american consumer, hosed.

Whenever gov’ts in the past have gone full in like they are doing now they have extended a recession into a long term economic downturn (ie depression). Whenever the gov’t has stayed to the sidelines for the most part, we have come out of the recessions fairly rapidly.

Who would want to put any money at risk, when the rules seem to change daily. Who would want to lend money when tomorow they may get a subisdy from the gov’t to do so or the gov’t may change the rules about how they get paid back. Everybody will continue to stay on the sidelines until we have a more firm set of rules and the free market can work through the overproduction, overconsumption, and to much debt of the last number of years. That can’t be done while the gov’t is trying to prop it all up. They are trying to fix the situation by doing more of the same.

They say that the gov’t is the only entity that can jolt our economy because the private sector is hurting. But they never question where the gov’t will get the money to do so. Yes that is right, they will get the money through the private sector, through taxation, borrowing, and lowering the value of the dollar through monetary inflation. The gov’t does not produce anything and the only way they get anything is by taking it from someone else who owns it or produces it.

They say they want to create jobs, but all they are doing at best is redistributing jobs to their special interest industries. They talk about all these construction jobs, but there are only so many people who are trained in how to do much of that work. Someone out of a job in the service industry likely will not benefit much from paving roads. They may be able to stand by the road holding a sign, but that isn’t the jobs we are looking for, is it. This means it will take far longer than they think and it will cost far more than they think as well. They are trying to push jobs for education and health care. These sectors already have very low unemployment. When the supply is low and you push more demand into it, you get higher prices. Look for costs in both of these sectors to continue to rise at a faster pace then the rest of the economy. They are pushing for jobs in the “green” economy. The problem is they are pushing them into things that are just not economically efficient today. They may be down the road but they aren’t today. This is an extremely inefficient use of our dollar at a time when we can’t afford inefficiency.

Tax cuts, while on the surface seem pretty good, without spending cuts they are just tax increases or inflation in the future in disguise. We are pushing the pain that we caused down the road to our children and grandchildren. Nice legacy. When we say “do it for the children” we are doing it to them in spades, alright. We are bankrupting them, just so we don’t have to feel any pain of our own poor decisions.

I choose doing nothing other than maybe helping people who are being hurt by this downturn and gov’t actions through not fault of their own.