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Would You Support a Second Stimulus Package?

Would you support a second stimulus package?


  • Total voters
    58
Anyone think raising the minimum wage had something to do with it? If interest rates are fixed by the government, doesn't that limit the money a bank can get? If they sign contracts with their costumers on a specified amount of interest, and that cannot be raised, wouldn't raising some of their employee's pay rate be a problem? If they are fixed on income, yet they are forced to pay more to some of their workers, doesn't that cause an imbalance?
 
Anyone think raising the minimum wage had something to do with it?

Perhaps, in some small, tangentially related way, but a direct effect? I don't think so. The root cause of this problem was expansionary monetary policy coupled with idiotic government incentives.

Our government provided the housing and financial sectors with both the means and opportunity to do what they did. It was the government's fault...AGAIN. No surprise there. Some people, however, are pathologically incapable of pointing the finger at our benevolent overseers, in fact, they can't even consider a solution that doesn't involve them.

The government is full of corrupt and self-interested cronies. It's time we recognized that fact.
 
There is now talk coming from an Obama advisor that a second package of stimulus money may be needed.

"The United States may need a second stimulus package focusing on infrastructure projects to put the world's biggest economy firmly on the path to recovery, a top White House adviser said here Tuesday."

US may need a second stimulus: Obama adviser - Yahoo! News

The advisor stated that this was her opinion and not the official word of the Obama Administration.

Would you support this if the Obama Administration tried to do it? Why, or why not?

I would only support it if the money went to the populace. No more corporate welfare and no more money to banks.
 
The only stimulus I would support would be for the people.

If they want to start paying people/things off, start paying off the debt the people have accrued from these ****ty conditions, otherwise back the hell off.

IMO instead of the spending, wiping the slab clean would be far more beneficial.


Think about it this way.

There are roughly 120,000,000 HOUSEHOLDS in the United States. If each of these households were given 20-30 grand (not money but debt relief) how much less would that be than these stimulus packages that have done nothing but give people who don't need more money... well... more money?

Screw corporate bail outs, start relieving the pressure or back up and watch.
 
Nor does a "booming" economy mean you have 14.3% unemployment, to claim as much is misleading. You could say the economy was "improving" but to say it was "booming" is a complete distortion of language. Unemployment was trending downwards while GNP was trending upwards, this doesn't mean the economy was "booming", not in any sense of the word.

If a cancer patient's malignancy decreases in size by 10% you can say their health is "improving" but you cannot claim they are "healthy" or that their health is "excellent", because the fact remains that they still have a cancerous malignancy growing on their body. From 1933-1936 the malignancy was decreasing in size but it was still there.

Fine, we'll say the economy was improving. Which is really what we need to look at in terms of policy. Even the best policies in the world aren't going to result in everyone getting suddenly hired. In fact, the only policies that could do that would be draconian and frightening.

Ethereal said:
Furthermore, this entire argument presupposes that the improvement came about as a consequence of the New Deal. How are we to know that the improvement wasn't simply a consequence of the free-market self-correcting IN SPITE of the New Deal?

We don't, but the timing is quite coincidental. The stock market crashed in 1929 and Hoover did nothing for the next four years...as the economy sank deeper and deeper. Then we had the New Deal and within a few months the economy had bottomed out...followed by several years of government spending and a recovering economy. Then FDR turned conservative in 1936 and cut back some of his spending on the advice of his advisors...and in late 1937 through 1938, we had another recession. Then we had a buildup to World War II, and the economy recovered.

Ethereal said:
This is such a simplistic and narrow-minded statement. The difference between a government stimulus package and the buildup to a world war is much more than semantical.

In both cases the government is pumping a lot of cash into the economy by buying something it deems will be beneficial to society.

Ethereal said:
This is ridiculous. You're saying that social perception is not key to economic recovery? Is that your position?

I'm sure perception has some effect on the economy...but hundreds of billions of dollars in new demand has a pretty sizable effect too.

Ethereal said:
The country was unified. That is an objective fact of reality. Moreover, you offered your disagreement absent any reasoning. How is the unification of a country "irrelevant" to economic recovery? Do you honestly think the effects of such a phenomenon are negligible?

Yes, they are negligible. The fact that everyone agreed that we needed to fight a war is irrelevant in terms of economics. The government paid a lot of cash demanding a lot of goods/services, which resulted in a lot of formerly unemployed people being hired.

And let's not forget that prior to Pearl Harbor, there WAS a lot of disagreement over whether we needed to go to war. Yet the recovery started well BEFORE Pearl Harbor, as we ramped up production in preparation for war.

Ethereal said:
I said real demand, not artificial demand. Building something does not create real demand for products and services if there was never a real demand for the project in the first place.

What if you're building tanks to crush Germans or bombers to kill Japs? There's no "real demand" for those products most of the time.

Ethereal said:
Real demand is characterized not only by the desire for a product or service but the ability to pay for it. Just because a state desires something does not mean they retain the ability to pay for it; absent the ability to pay for something there is no real demand, only artificial.

WWII created real demand for products and services. Not only did we desire these products and services, we NEEDED them (that, in and of itself, is a crucial distinction), and we also had the ability (the willingness) to pay for them.

Whether or not we "need" something is subjective and irrelevant to the economic stimulus side of the equation. That might come into play years after we spend the money, but it doesn't effect the state of the economy now.

The short-term economic result of the stimulus would be the same whether we had taken all of those tanks to fight a war in Europe, or sent them to Antarctica and set them on fire.

As for the ability and willingness to pay for these products...we had nowhere NEAR the ability/willingness to pay for WWII. Yet the economy still boomed.

Ethereal said:
Allow me to clarify, I'm not speaking to long-term sustainability on the magnitude of decades, I'm speaking to short-term sustainability on the magnitude of several years.

The war infused the market with confidence which subsequently encouraged people to hire and spend. That is the difference between a simple stimulus plan and the buildup to a world war. People HAD to hire, and work, and spend, and produce. It wasn't a choice for them. That's why it was sustainable in the short-term.

I don't understand. They had to hire, work, spend, and produce because the government was giving them a lot of money to do so. How is that different from now?
 
We don't, but the timing is quite coincidental. The stock market crashed in 1929 and Hoover did nothing for the next four years...as the economy sank deeper and deeper.

revisionist lies

Rexford Tugwell: "We didn't admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started."

The truth is Hoover spent more in 4 years on public works projects then were spent in the previous 30 combined.

Hoover said:
We might have done nothing.........That would have been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.

The do nothing president was Harding, which is why the recession of 1921 is never discussed.
 
revisionist lies

Rexford Tugwell: "We didn't admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started."

The truth is Hoover spent more in 4 years on public works projects then were spent in the previous 30 combined.



The do nothing president was Harding, which is why the recession of 1921 is never discussed.

OK, well I shouldn't say Hoover did nothing. What I mean is he did relatively little compared to FDR.
 
The do nothing president was Harding, which is why the recession of 1921 is never discussed.

OK, well I shouldn't say Hoover did nothing. What I mean is he did relatively little compared to FDR.

And it is a damn shame Hoover didn't do nothing. Had he emulated Harding and done nothing, the economic horror show of FDR's New Deal might never have been attempted.
 
A series of tax cuts would be the most beneficial course of action. Each progressive cut in taxes would act as a little confidence boost while simultaneously freeing up more money without risking inflation. Confidence and more money minus inflation, that cures recessions.

Real questionable. A series of tax cuts without corresponding increases in assets will result in inflation. Furthermore, giving people back small amounts of money won't increase confidence. Remember the tiny Bush tax cuts that effectively did nothing? How do you not risk inflation by increasing the money supply with no corresponding increases in asset values?

The beneficial course of action is to reduce the insane burden on healthcare on private businesses, eliminate the corporate tax and actually have a stimulus that spends money at a fast rate. Not a paltry 3%.
 
And it is a damn shame Hoover didn't do nothing. Had he emulated Harding and done nothing, the economic horror show of FDR's New Deal might never have been attempted.

A discussion that ignores the issue of free trade is highly suspect. Blaming FDR without dealing with the high level of global trade at the time and the subsequent dirty trade wars that happened before is extreme bias.
 
A discussion that ignores the issue of free trade is highly suspect. Blaming FDR without dealing with the high level of global trade at the time and the subsequent dirty trade wars that happened before is extreme bias.
Henry Morgenthau blamed FDR as well as himself, and he was there.

Regardless of the global situation, the New Deal was a failure, it wasted US dollars and prolonged the slump in the United States. That's not bias. That's history.
 
Doing a half-assed job and getting half-assed results doesn't mean that you should stop trying, it means you should do it right. :roll:



The Great Depression? World War II?
Just to jot this in, FDR's Great Deal (Big Deal, whatever) caused the depression to linger on and i think that in balance the opening up of markets with the war going on undid the depression and if we had opened up the markets to begin with ( or never let them close) there would be no war. and even if we just opened up the market when the depression began and then went to war it would have been obvious that the affect of the war was a weight on the economy. Although it is likely we would have been in a better position still to fight the war and come war's end we would have been in a better position to dictate terms in the conclusion of the war. :2usflag: :)
 
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Hell ****ing yeah!

To stimulate the economy, the military not only reinstates all enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses that were evilly taken away, we double all of them.


man that was some bull****. there's budgeting, then there's being cheap and throwing billions down the drain while being cheap.
 
Henry Morgenthau blamed FDR as well as himself, and he was there.

Regardless of the global situation

How can you rationally say that? The US during the 1920s had a huge percentage of its economy directly tied to world trade. The indirect amount of GDP related to direct trade must have been immense. To pretend that the global situation, in which the US economy was previously heavily integrated did not matter is certifiably insane. It's like saying right now that free trade is irrelevant towards economic expansion.

the New Deal was a failure, it wasted US dollars and prolonged the slump in the United States. That's not bias. That's history.

See above.

You have failed to discuss the impact of global trade barriers. Thus you have massive bias. And it's not history when you don't account for a 400 lb gorilla in the room.
 
A second second stimulus would just be another vehicle for our unbelievably corrupt government officials to steal more of the wealth of this country.

Has anyone noticed the inflated prices of food?
 
You have failed to discuss the impact of global trade barriers. Thus you have massive bias. And it's not history when you don't account for a 400 lb gorilla in the room.
There is no 400lb gorilla in the room. Try reading what I wrote instead of knee-jerking to what you think I meant to write.

And it is a damn shame Hoover didn't do nothing. Had he emulated Harding and done nothing, the economic horror show of FDR's New Deal might never have been attempted.

Had Hoover done nothing, that doing nothing would have included not signing the notorious Smoot Hawley tariffs, the foundation of these "global trade barriers" you are obsessing about.

Hoover's interventions were bad. FDR's interventions were considerably worse. The lesson drawn from both of their administrations it that government involvement in economic matters is a piss poor idea that needs to not be attempted ever.
 
How can you rationally say that? The US during the 1920s had a huge percentage of its economy directly tied to world trade. The indirect amount of GDP related to direct trade must have been immense. To pretend that the global situation, in which the US economy was previously heavily integrated did not matter is certifiably insane. It's like saying right now that free trade is irrelevant towards economic expansion.
Business & Finance: Exports, Imports - TIME

Exports in 1928 were $5,129,000,000. Imports in 1928 were $4,091,000,000.

Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Exports in 1929 were $5.4Billion and imports that year $4.4 Billion.

GDP in 1928 was $97 Billion and $103.6 billion in 1929.

Federal Spending, State and Local Public Spending for 1928 - Charts
Federal Spending, State and Local Public Spending for 1929 - Charts

Where's the huge percentage?
 
Where's the huge percentage?

5% of the economy was directly related to exports. 4% was related to imports.

Tell me, how do you think our economy would work if you ripped out 11% of it?

Furthermore, tell me, how do you think our economy would work if you destroyed the indirect effect? At a meager 1.5 multiplier, that's 13.5% of the economy gone. At a more reasonable 2%, that's almost 20% of the economy wiped out. Tell me, if the US economy went from $11 trillion to $8.8 trillion, do you think that would matter?

I take it you have absolutely no idea what spending multipliers are eh?
 
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5% of the economy was directly related to exports. 4% was related to imports.

Tell me, how do you think our economy would work if you ripped out 11% of it?

Furthermore, tell me, how do you think our economy would work if you destroyed the indirect effect? At a meager 1.5 multiplier, that's 13.5% of the economy gone. At a more reasonable 2%, that's almost 20% of the economy wiped out. Tell me, if the us economy went from $11 trillion to $8.8 trillion, do you think that would matter?

I take it you have absolutely no idea what spending multipliers are eh?
5 + 4 = 11?
 
5 + 4 = 11?

Sorry. 9%. Odd. Especially since 13.5% is 1.5 multiplier of the 9%. I think I saw imports at 6% originally and then edited.

Food for thought:

Between 1929 and 1932 the total value of world trade had declined by more than half.

Great Depression in the United States - MSN Encarta

There's a reason why so many people are adamant against trade barriers right now. They know what made the stock market crash of 1929 into a full blown depression. Any discussion about the depression without talking about world trade is rather idiotic. Ignoring the 400 lb gorilla doesn't make a good argument.

Ripping out 20% of an economy is going to seriously hurt. Celticlord apparently does not want to talk about this.
 
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