Obama Spending

[Gene Scarborough]

Here is the most important calculator of government spending:



It clearly shows how we are spending money foolishly on war to the neglect of national needs!

Read it and weep

[ET]

[Gene Scarborough]

ET---

You missed the most important point: it is our money they are spending.

Get to the philosophy of the party. Republicans love to posit that the rich getting richer generates more business and jobs = total lie!!!

The Democrats seem to think that entitlements help = total lie as well!

Make the welfare recipients get off their tails and work 40 hours for their check. Make the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes. Quit encouraging anyone to send jobs overseas. Send the liars and cheats in banking and investment to the Federal Pen when they have robbed the average investor of 40% of their worth through creative accounting. People foolish enough to trust these liars from now on deserve the results of their greed!

[KeithE]

[ET]

[KeithE]

[ET]

Well, I'm not how much stock one can put in a polling of a grand total of 50 economists. Not exactly a large sampling. So what happens when Krugman & Co. max out the credit cards? What then? I wonder if the Greeks had been following Krugman and Friedman's advice. Appears so.

Besides, there are far-reaching implications when one presumes to know how to "stimulate" an economy of 300 million people and to believe that they can pick and choose the "right" people or industries to receive the money (the arrogance of human beings knows no bounds!!), but that is a broader philosophical discussion that I do not wish to dive into at this time.

Why do liberals/progressives believe in government-directed spending via printing money or going into debt over cutting tax rates FOR EVERYBODY and therefore letting INDIVIDUALS decide how to spend that money instead of some politician or bureaucrat?

For those interested in the topic, there's this article:

[KeithE]

[Gene Scarborough]

Now we are citing reality on what a government should or should not do in Depression/Recession conditions.

My Parents and farmer grandfather went through it. What had happened to the greatest number of small businesses in America was their farming efficiency had out-produced demand for goods. My grandaddy had cotton bales on his porch and could not sell them for more than $3 a bale. He owed for the mules and feed to produce them. He could barely feed his family from the fields, he could not buy the clothes produced from his cotton.

FDR went into office in a disaster with the same promises as President Obama = help the working man and give us jobs.

The economists advising FDR came up with a plan: pay the farmer NOT to plant crops not needed. Offer him money now in a government check in April/May equal to the profit he would have made by planting another crop. It was called the Soil Bank.

When my grandaddy got his check, he made a straight trip to town and cashed it. He went to every person he owed and paid his debts = feed / seed and fertilizer from last year / clothes bought for children last year. He left with money still in his pocket! That was Step 1

Those businessmen turned around and paid their suppliers---plus ordered more goods because the farmers could now buy the goods in their stores. That was Step 2

The suppliers could now pay their workers owed back wages and they called them back in quickly to start filling the new orders. That was Step 3

The workers got off the food lines, returned home from places they had gone on trains seeking work as hobos. They might have lost all in banks closing, but now there was work and income to make house payments and buy food and clothes. Their end of the world was now operating again with money flowing. That was Step 4

The way any economy works is the circulation of money. Somehow, no one in Washington has read that chapter nor wants to use the "D" word for what is happening now! According to what was told to me this is IDENTICAL to the Great Depression: it is world wide / it is effecting all but the most wealthy / it is depriving older people of the values in their savings and investments / no one lying, cheating, and stealing is getting the cuffs over laws and regulations installed to prevent another Depression from happening.

Derivatives brought the market and banks down in 1929. The same stuff did the same in 2006, The simple description of a Derivative is a piece of manure wrapped in a plastic bag to stop the smell---and wrapped in gold foil to make it look pretty and salable to some gullible person or some despirate Wall Street investor about to lose his shirt from constant bad deals and losses for years. It was totally outlawed by the SEC, but allowed back by lax regulators since Reaganomics came into vogue.

It has not worked / it will not work / you can't get something for nothing / greed is NOT good!

All our government has done thus far is to bail out banks / autos / investment firms which still pay their CEO's---who made the greedy decisions---millions to keep on doing their deception. Even those who resigned left with enough money to live in fine style for the rest of their lives!

Open the book on FDR and the Depression and you will find your magic answer. Bush tried war and that certainly did not work. Our red ink today that everyone is crying about is a direct result----mostly from war in the Middle East we cannot afford---to the neglect of our highways and bridges deteriorating and our parks being closed along with mental institutions and public health along with education. You can only go so long spending more than you take in and allowing the rich to pay almost nothing. TRICKLE DOWN is a complete failure!!! Shipping jobs overseas is benefiting foreign lands while we are tumbling down!

[Sandy]

The flawed view of Republican economics is tied in with the belief that government spending is bad for the economy. That is proven to be completely false by history, which shows that when government spending was highest, the economy was growing the fastest. It is not government spending that is the problem, it is deficit government spending. That's a "have your cake and eat it too" proposal to enrich the wealthiest of the wealthy at government expense. Tax subsidies and breaks at the highest levels of the income strata wind up becoming costs to the government, which bears a lot of the expense of providing a safe, secure environment in which business survives and thrives. The less big business helps out with the expense incurred by the government for its protection, and for the infrastructure needed for it to move its goods and sell its services, the more of a deficit the government must incur in order to bear the cost of their doing business.

That's GOP economics in a nutshell; finding ways to get the government to force the working class to pay for the expenses racked up by big business in order to increase profits.

[ET]

[ET]

[ET]

[David Flick]

[Gene Scarborough]

[KeithE]

[KeithE]

[ET]

[KeithE]

The New Deal (increased spending) did increase GDP from int’s inception in 1933 to 1941. See GDP plot below.

And contrary to Friedman’s claim that it "prolonged and added to unemployment”, unemployment went down from 24.9% in 1933 (when the started) to 14.6% in 1940 and 9.9% in 1941 (we entered the war in Dec 1941). The war caused more jobs to be created and unemployment went down more quickly as the war geared up. Perhaps weapons making for allies begun increasing employment (thru government spending) somewhat in 1940-1. But that only makes my point more valid. Government jobs (for any purpose) revives the economy by placing money in spenders hands (even if that money is just printed). We got our deficit under control rather quickly after WWII ended. In fact we had a surplus by 1947.

Why can’t jobs promoted by the government pull us out of this recession? The stimulus did help, but not as much as it could have, Too much of the stimulus did not create jobs as much as it increased the coffers of businesses who are sitting on over a $1T profits because they see no buyers for goods and services.

And if we as a nation are going to create jobs, it might as well be jobs that enhance our future - education, alternative energy, infrastructure repair (badly needed), and mass transit like China has invested in already.

As we get more into the lassie-faire philosophies, we dig the recession deeper just like the austerity program in Greece.

[ET]

[KeithE]

You base too much on supposition like the Depression would ended sooner if the government had stayed out of it.

We will just have to think differently on these matters ET.

[Gene Scarborough]

ET---

I am seeing enough infrastructure issues needing a fix to put welfare recipients to work along with those without jobs for a long time.

I cited the Soil Bank solution for the small farmer which gave my grandfather an out and started money flowing once more.

There were major improvement projects like the TVA and Hoover Dam all allowing people to find work.

Our only recent steps have been the extension of unemploymenet benefits over and over. This is giving people just enough to pay basic bills without any long-term impovements to anything but more tit sucking. What worked in the Depression can work again, but it must start at the small business level and public works benefiting the taxpayer.

[KeithE]

[Gene Scarborough]

The down side for politicians is us small businesses can't bribe (contribute) them with campaign money very well!!!

[Ed Pettibone]