House of Eratosthenes

That’s the name of the slug in the hyperlink and also of the TITLE attribute of the page. The human-readable headline, itself, has been changed to “How Not to Revive an Economy,” but with lots of other stuff not updated. Interesting…

The stimulus — a historic package of tax cuts, safety-net spending, infrastructure projects and green-energy investments — certainly did a lot of good. As the economists Alan S. Blinder and Mark Zandi have noted, it’s one of the key reasons the unemployment rate isn’t in double digits now.

But the stimulus ultimately failed to bring about a strong, sustainable recovery. Money was spread far and wide rather than dedicated to programs with the most bang for the buck. “Shovel-ready” projects, those that would put people to work right away, took too long to break ground. Investments in worthwhile long-term projects, on the other hand, were often rushed to meet arbitrary deadlines, and the resulting shoddy outcomes tarnished the projects’ image.

The real problem is, this is always the result. Every single stated objective is missed, the money’s gone nevertheless, and in the end, in order to defend what was done you have to say “yeah, but if we didn’t do it, things would be a whole lot worse.”

I’m not completely sure what, at this point, is the very lowest calculated per-head cost I’ve heard in saving or creating these jobs. It’s somewhere greater than half a million but less than a full million, so it’s well in the six digits. Per. Job.

The article is very friendly to the ideas behind stimulus spending, but like every other softball summary I’ve seen, it fails to take into account the temporary nature of a lot of these jobs. Great emphasis has been placed on teachers and road construction; I scarcely hear of any concern for any other occupation. And sad to say, nuclear plant cleanup falls into that — because — sooner or later, the plant’s been cleaned up, just as the highway has been widened or the entrance ramp built or the backroad has been paved. The teacher job, hopefully, has some permanance to it. But where does the plant-cleanup guy go? Where does the construction guy go?

So the notion that we’re enjoying a lower unemployment rate now, due to the Reinvestment Act, is something I’d like to see put to a bit more vigorous inspection. I mean, really? How would that work? And even if it did, isn’t $600,000 per job a little high?

“The stimulus — a historic package of tax cuts, safety-net spending, infrastructure projects and green-energy investments — certainly did a lot of good.”

Wait a minute, I thought tax cuts where wrong, something about fairness and…the failed policy of the last administration, blah, blah…But I do love how people desperately trying to justify the failed Stimulus casually throw in NOT collecting more taxes into a SPENDING bill.

And what the fuck is “safety-net spending” and how exactly did it “work”? Do they mean public sector union jobs weren’t lost? Do they mean folks in Nebraska who run their state responsibly and CAN’T have a deficit are paying for teachers in New York?

As far as infrastructure projects, aren’t they supposed to be an ongoing thing all the freakin’ time? I mean, it’s the one thing conservatives and panty waist libs can agree on, we like our roads to be…I dunn’o…maintained. We do pay taxes for just that purpose. Why exactly do we have to have a “stimulus” to pay for something that has always been in the budget, or should be unless the Democrats don’t feel like passing one, all the time. What’s next, a “stimulus” for clean water or a “stimulus” for our national defense?!? “Hey kids, we’re sorry, we were suppose to be spending money on tanks and planes and such but we decided to give everyone on welfare a raise…and a car…so now, we need to barrow trillions from the Chinese for that.”

The best one is last, right next to that most laughable, if it wasn’t so fucking maddening, line – “certainly did a lot of good” that being the now infamous “green-energy investments.” Where? When? How? We’re still driving cars powered by petrol, still getting our electricity from coal. I haven’t seen my gas & electric bill decreased by all the wind farms and solar panels. Maybe it’s just me though.

Who benefited from “green-energy investments”, besides the millionaires and billionaires who contributed to Obama’s campaign and their now bankrupted companies? The writers should immediate be drug tested, seriously. How many examples and millions of dollars vanishing do these idiots need to stop supporting “green energy”? How many Chevy Volts NOT sold will persuade these numbnuts?

Hell, the just the fact that a gallon of gas is double the cost, for an historic amount of time to boot, what it was upon Obama being inaugurated should tell anyone with half a brain something. If the “green-energy investments” were indeed such a success all energy costs would be cheaper. Certainly not HIGHER!

Ass maggots.
- tim | 02/13/2012 @ 10:20
How many examples and millions of dollars vanishing do these idiots need to stop supporting “green energy”? How many Chevy Volts NOT sold will persuade these numbnuts?

Zero. They’re un-persuadeable.

“Green jobs” are Jordache jeans. I’m showing my age a bit here, but when I was in school, Jordache jeans were the thing to have. All the cool kids had them, and while the mere fact of having them wouldn’t guarantee your coolness, you couldn’t be cool without them.

Until one day, they just…. weren’t. Seemingly overnight, the cool kids moved seamlessly from Jordache to whatever came next (Hammer pants or some damn thing). “Green energy” is like that. As more people finally realize the extent of the “global warming” scam, “green energy” will be replaced by some other leftist pet cause that will serve as yet another platform from which to bleat about the glories of socialism (and for Dem politicians and their friends to get fat off the taxpayer’s wallet).

[PS. I know this was a rhetorical question, but hey… even rhetorical questions have answers].
- Severian | 02/13/2012 @ 11:14
I recognize my perspective might be skewed here, since I was one of the uncool kids wearing whatever Mom could find that was cheapest…and now as far as saving the environment, I just squeak when it comes time to buy gas, read that as drive-a-four-banger, and I think the greenie propaganda is just a bunch of leftist hippie codswallop…but, to me, it looks like the same people. They wore the Jordache jeans in seventh grade, and now they’re drinking the Kool Aid, shutting off their coffee pots to save the environment. And making sure everyone can see ’em doing it.

Oh no wait what am I saying, they don’t brew their own…they go to a coffee shop to have it done. They drive there in their mammoth SUVs, and have a “barista” take their order and spew lots of carbon into the atmosphere making ’em something frothy. Then they haul it out to their vehicle of choice, which has eight cylinders or more and is huge, so they can sit way up high and feel safe.
- mkfreeberg | 02/13/2012 @ 11:22
“As more people finally realize the extent of the “global warming” scam, “green energy” will be replaced by some other leftist pet cause that will serve as yet another platform from which to bleat about the glories of socialism”

Like “Hope/Change“, “No War (Iraq Version)”, “Save the Whales”, “No Nukes”, “Save the Rain Forest“, “Free Tibet”, “Save the Earth“, “Women’s Lib”, “No War (Vietnam Version)…

Like Morgan says, “Liberals, always one revolution away from happiness. Always.” (Hope I got that right.)
- tim | 02/13/2012 @ 14:12
I guess that’s kinda what I was getting at, albeit incoherently — “green energy” is a fad the way pretty much everything leftist is a fad. Right now the trendy people are into “green energy,” but as it is becoming obvious to even the media-cocooned dumbasses on the coasts that “global warming” is a sham, we’ll be hearing a lot less about “green energy” in the next few years and more and more about…. whatever it is. Doesn’t matter, so long as a) it results in no measurable decrease in liberals’ quality of life, b) liberals can get all preachy while doing it, and c) liberal politicians and their cronies can make money off it. You’ll be able to look a typical liberal straight in the face and ask him: “hey, whatever happened to green energy?” and he’ll just sneer at you (or call you a racist).

[cf. Global cooling, the carbon-caused environmental catastrophe that was going to kill us all back in the 70s. Anyone, anywhere, ever hear a liberal admit he was wrong about that? I mean, you’d kinda think they’d have to cop to it, right? What with the whole “freaking out about the exact opposite thing from the thing you were just freaking out about five minutes ago” thing and all, right?

But such is the nature of fads. People will often say “boy, I sure looked silly trying to pull off the Don Johnson look back in the 80s;” they will never say “I was wrong to wear a pink t-shirt with a white linen sport coat and loafers without socks.”]
- Severian | 02/13/2012 @ 15:51
Trillion dollar stimulus that would have made the economy roar : four months of no
federal tax;no income tax payment,no socsec payment,no medicare/medicade payment. Hundred percent paycheck with no deductions.
- kermitt | 02/14/2012 @ 07:05
– tim | 02/13/2012 @ 14:12

The whole “Free Tibet” thing always mystified me. Free it from whom? Why, the Chinese communists who’ve occupied the country since 1950, of course. (For reasons I never bothered to look up, Mao Zedong went in there and took over the place the year after completing his communist revolution of 1949 in China proper.) Okay, great. Uhm…..how do you plan to free it? Send the Dali Lama in to negotiate with the Butchers of Beijing? If that were an option, it would have worked by now. The Chinese army has had a firm grip on the territory for over 60 years now.

The only way I see of “freeing Tibet” is militarily, and these loony left types seem to be pretty antiwar as a matter of principle, so that kind of exhausts our options. (That doesn’t even ask WHO would initiate military action, as I see only one (maybe two) countries on Earth who would have any desire, much less the ability, to take on Red China.) I even questioned one of these Free Tibet’ers after seeing this bumper sticker on her pickup, and her response was that the Dali would never sanction military action on his behalf. Great. I wanted to say, “Then maybe it’s time to scrape that stupid thing off your bumper, because Tibet’s not getting “freed” anytime soon.
- cylarz | 02/16/2012 @ 23:49

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

“How the Stimulus Fell Short”Monday, February 13th, 2012

“How the Stimulus Fell Short”
Monday, February 13th, 2012