Battle of the 'Stimulus' Plans: Bush vs. Obama

President Bush expanded the federal budget by a historic $700 billion through 2008. President Obama would add another $1 trillion. Both president's singed into law very different "stimulus" plans in comparison to each other.

So, with some fun facts to look at, the question is this: whose "stimulus" provided more... stimuli, per say? Let's take a look...

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:elephantf
Bush's economic "stimulus" was the first of several enacted to help revive the economy. When President Bush signed into law his economic stimulus plan, a good majority of American's actually felt it. If even slightly, Bush's "stimulus" was a plan to essentially get money into the hands of the American people, and to help jump start a sluggish economy. Under Bush's economic "stimulus," roughly 130 million households got checks in the mail or deposited to a bank account online. I can actually think back and remember President Bush's economic stimulus.

The other part of Bush's "stimulus" plan involved what many people call the bailout of Wall Street. Bush gave the Treasury secretary the authority to buy $700 billion in mortgage-related assets, in a plan that would raise the statutory limit on the national debt from $10.6 trillion to $11.3 trillion. The Treasury secretary then had broad power to buy and sell the toxic mortgage-related assets without any additional involvement by Congress.

Some leading congressional Democrats said this of President Bush's "stimulus" bailout.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd voiced confidence in Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, saying that "we've got the right man" to deal with the problem that has roiled not only Wall Street but international markets as well. But his counterpart in the House, Rep. Barney Frank, accused Paulson of pushing Congress to move too hastily.

Dodd, D-Conn., said Monday morning that there will be a division of thought in Congress about how best to proceed on a $700 billion bill the Bush administration is seeking from lawmakers to buy up bad mortgage loans that have been weighing down financial companies since they became engulfed in a severe credit crisis 14 months ago.

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:donkeyfla
President Obama's stimulus package was much different than Bush's, it was the Democrats version of economic "stimulus." Rather than send government singed checks to all American's, Obama's stimulus was a bit more partisan, but just as wasteful and irrational as the others. Unlike Bush's stimulus, it's difficult to think back and actually 'remember' this stimulus plan. It had very little effect on the average American citizens, and it actually increased unemployment numbers rather its intention.

Oddly, President Obama's stimulus package included provisions that had nothing to do with "stimulating" the economy. Such as "health rules," of which will affect "every individual in the United States." It created a new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, which will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. These provisions in Obama's stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Since Obama's "stimulus" didn't send checks to the every day, average American citizen, where did it go? Here's a small list of places where tax dollars landed from Obama's stimulus:

$5.2 billion to ACORN for community-development block grants and “neighborhood stabilization activities.”
$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
$380 million in the Senate bill for the Women, Infants and Children program
$300 million for grants to combat violence against women
$2 billion for federal child-care block grants
$6 billion for university building projects
$15 billion for boosting Pell Grant college scholarships
$4 billion for job-training programs, including $1.2 billion for “youths” up to the age of 24
$1 billion for community-development block grants
$4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities”
$650 million for digital-TV coupons; $90 million to educate “vulnerable populations”
$150 million for the Smithsonian
$34 million to renovate the Department of Commerce headquarters
$500 million for improvement projects for National Institutes of Health facilities
$44 million for repairs to Department of Agriculture headquarters
$350 million for Agriculture Department computers
$88 million to help move the Public Health Service into a new building
$448 million for constructing a new Homeland Security Department headquarters
$600 million to convert the federal auto fleet to hybrids
$450 million for NASA (carve-out for “climate-research missions”)
$600 million for NOAA (carve-out for “climate modeling”)
$1 billion for the Census Bureau
$89 billion for Medicaid
$30 billion for COBRA insurance extension
$36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits
$20 billion for food stamps
$4.5 billion for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
$850 million for Amtrak
$87 million for a polar icebreaking ship
$1.7 billion for the National Park System
$55 million for Historic Preservation Fund
$7.6 billion for “rural community advancement programs”
$150 million for agricultural-commodity purchases
$150 million for “producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish”
$2 billion for renewable-energy research ($400 million for global-warming research)
$2 billion for a “clean coal” power plant in Illinois
$6.2 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program
$3.5 billion for energy-efficiency and conservation block grants
$3.4 billion for the State Energy Program
$200 million for state and local electric-transport projects
$300 million for energy-efficient-appliance rebate programs
$400 million for hybrid cars for state and local governments
$1 billion for the manufacturing of advanced batteries
$1.5 billion for green-technology loan guarantees
$8 billion for innovative-technology loan-guarantee program
$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects
$4.5 billion for electricity grid
$79 billion for State Fiscal Stabilization Fund

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After just one year in office, President Obama raised the statutory limit on the national debt from $11.3 trillion to $14.3 trillion.

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rof

Did either stimulus plan from both president's actually work? Bush started the process of government intervention by "bailing out" failure, which became the start of a new trend in U.S. Politics ...rewarding bad behavior, which his predecessor took great advantage of. In an interview discussing his book, [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Free-Market-Collapsed-Government-Bailouts/dp/1596985879"]Meltdown[/ame]Thomas E Woods Jr. said the following about the Depression of 1920, and how the government at that time dealt with a struggling economy much differently. The U.S. government during the depression of 1920 dealt with it a lot more rationally than both Bush and Obama.

WOODS: No one's ever heard of the Depression of 1920 and the reason is congress didn't try to get us out of it. It was far worse, if you actually look at employment, it was actually far worse than the Depression of 1929 that everybody has heard of. What did we have? A fiscal stimulus? To the contrary the government did everything that's fashionable economics shouldn't do and they actually cut the budget. So you actually had a negative stimulus according to them but to me that's a wonderful thing to do. [...] The Federal Reserve system inflate the money supply? They hardly did anything. They didn't know what to do. The president at the time was Warren Harding ... by the time it occurred to him to do something, the depression was over and the U.S. was back to setting production records. So I think there is a lesson here when you compare it to what did they do in the year 1929.

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...Compare the actions of the U.S. government during the depression of 1920, and the depression of 1929, and now the Great Recession of the late 2000's. You do the math. In my opinion, all of the bailouts are the real failure of today's government. Nobody wins. :2bow:

yup. bush's stimulus was based on the notion that the general populace could invest better than investors. obamas' was based on the notion that congress could.

The question in my mind is whether Bush's TARP program actually helped stabilize and liberalize lending? That was it's intention I believe.

I think the point is that, had the U.S. government via Bush and Obama not increased the debt limit from $10.6 trillion to $14.3 trillion, we'd all be much better off without any government "stimulus."

I guess if you absolutely HAD to bailout someone or something, Bush's TARP program to purchase all of the bad debt was likely the most reasonable stimulus plan. However, that's not saying much because I don't think either Bush's or Obama's stimulus plans were a good thing.

$4 TRILLION in debt added to the backs of taxpayers, all in the name of "stimulus." To me, that sounds like robbery, not a plan to get the economy back up and running smoothly again.

reefedjib said:

The question in my mind is whether Bush's TARP program actually helped stabilize and liberalize lending? That was it's intention I believe.

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I'm inclined to say no, but I'm willing to give that an open airing. The problem is it stands as a classic example about the danger of giving powers to government; it took less time to get used and abused for auto company bailouts than even I would have suspected. What was the old quote about giving money and power to government being like giving whiskey and car keys to teenagers?

cpwill said:

I'm inclined to say no, but I'm willing to give that an open airing.

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I think I agree. I am skeptical because the problem was so much larger than the funds allocated to fix it and there didn't seem to be much leverage. But did it have ANY effect? Stop the bleeding?

The problem is it stands as a classic example about the danger of giving powers to government; it took less time to get used and abused for auto company bailouts than even I would have suspected. What was the old quote about giving money and power to government being like giving whiskey and car keys to teenagers?

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And that was Obama that misused the funds, was it not? Not that I am saying the original use of the funds from Bush was desirable, but setting the timeline. They awfully good at spending Monopoly Money.

reefedjib said:

I think I agree. I am skeptical because the problem was so much larger than the funds allocated to fix it and there didn't seem to be much leverage. But did it have ANY effect? Stop the bleeding?

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I honestly don't know. My instinct is to doubt it, and I think there were a number of manners in which we could have given banks a safety line without spending all that money, and without creating that size of a moral hazard. allowing banks to switch from mark-to-market to mark-to-income rules would have helped tremendously; the vast majority of bank losses weren't from people getting foreclosed on; it was from mark-to-market losses as the value of housing went down.

And that was Obama that misused the funds, was it not?

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Nope; Bush did that, probably out of desire to see as smooth a transition from his to the Obama administration as possible. but still, be it on his head.

reefedjib said:

I think I agree. I am skeptical because the problem was so much larger than the funds allocated to fix it and there didn't seem to be much leverage. But did it have ANY effect? Stop the bleeding?



And that was Obama that misused the funds, was it not? Not that I am saying the original use of the funds from Bush was desirable, but setting the timeline. They awfully good at turning the U.S. dollar into Monopoly Money.

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Fixed.

President Obama's stimulus package was much different than Bush's, it was the Democrats version of economic "stimulus." Rather than send government singed checks to all American's, Obama's stimulus was a bit more partisan, but just as wasteful and irrational as the others. Unlike Bush's stimulus, it's difficult to think back and actually 'remember' this stimulus plan. It had very little effect on the average American citizens, and it actually increased unemployment numbers rather its intention.

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That is the most Informative and Unbiased analysis I have ever read.

THANK YOU:

I would have to say Obama's Stimulus was better. It enforced the idea of "Not Letting Detroit Default" basically. The reason America will pick Obama over Romney in the fall, is because Obama saved an industry that gives Americans jobs, and not one that likes to throw our money away on their own bonuses.

I wasn't aware that tax cuts for the wealthy and a decade of war qualified as a "stimulus".

cpwill said:

I'm inclined to say no, but I'm willing to give that an open airing. The problem is it stands as a classic example about the danger of giving powers to government; it took less time to get used and abused for auto company bailouts than even I would have suspected. What was the old quote about giving money and power to government being like giving whiskey and car keys to teenagers?

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As much as people tend to dislike the fact that we bailed out major financial firms, this action will be proven to be the most important reason we did not fall into a depression. There was good old fashioned run on the banks going on. This totally froze bank lending which in turn had the effect of many large companies cutting production, and thus laying off many people. Let's also remember that this was a very expensive loan that we made the big banks. To the best of my knowledge all of the big banks have repaid the loans plus interest plus profit. Even the AIG loan seems like it will be profitable.

Not sure why this thread seems to link our debt going up to the Bush TARP program. It did initially increase the debt but the money was repaid so why count it as an increase to our debt?

Let me lace up my lollerblades for this one.

'stimulus' plans do nothing to stimulate the economy. here are the 'steps' of a stimulus

1. government takes money from me (a taxpayer)
result: I have less money to spend

2. government gives my money to somebody else
result: somebody else has more money to spend

3. economy is somehow fixed???

if I give 20 $ to my friend, how does that help the economy? Money exchanging hands does not create wealth. The net result of a 'stimulus' is actually a negative. It takes money from productive people / businesses and gives it to failing businesses hurting the companies that are actually prospering and creating jobs.