House of Eratosthenes

Stimulus programs are always going to be bullshit. They’re always going to net results just like this. It shoulda had a bigger effect, shoulda had a better one, shoulda been longer-lasting, shoulda, shoulda…woulda-coulda-shoulda. This one wasn’t manly enough because it went to schoolteachers first and construction workers second; if it went the other way ’round, it would’ve discriminated against women. If it had somehow managed to balance those out perfectly and duck all criticism there, it wouldn’t have been gay enough. And then it would have discriminated against the handicapped.

Stimulus spending is not about success, it’s about finding excuses for the failure before you even get started. Meanwhile, you know what? A lot of us don’t work in public schools or in construction.

If the money was just left in the free market…the kinda sorta free market…then anybody who wants to complain about where the money’s getting spent, would have to take it up with each of the millions upon millions of people doing the spending. And that is the point to a government stimulus program: To gather the money into one channel, so people can look at how it was spent and then bitch about it. It makes the bitching and blaming and finger-pointing easier. All this talk about how to make the next one work better, is just a crock. This one was as big as we can afford, and it went as well as it’s ever gonna. It was still a complete flop — and that’s what the process looks like. Anyone who needs to run a few more cycles on a merry-go-round so they’ve got time to get that figured out, I think they should go off somewhere and do it in an isolated test environment, with a lot less money. If they find out I’m wrong, let us know…otherwise…don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you.

My benchmark for whether a “stimulus” “worked” is pretty much the same as Sonic’s “Fake Jobs Test.” If the cost per “job” created is more than simply handing the money over to individuals — if it actually costs more than straight-up raw socialism — then it’s a failure.

Sonic points out that the current “stimulus” price tag is about 1.6 million per “job.” We could’ve had TWO “jobs” at 80K per for ten years for that same amount, which would of course entail an entire decade of those fabled multipliers and second-order whatzits and all that other stuff that our poetry major Keynsians so like totally understand and stuff. As an added bonus, this plan would fulfill one of the key demands of the Occupy Wall Street crowd… and they’d still be surly and miserable, thus proving once and for all the, ahem, dialectical relationship between Marxism, not knowing what the fuck you’re talking about, and being a miserable toothache of a human being.

That’s winning all around, as far as I’m concerned.
- Severian | 10/05/2011 @ 05:57
Whenever the subject comes us of “government job creation” or anything else related, I haul out this quote:

Planned Chaos (1947) by Ludwig Von Mises

“Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other. If government spending is financed by borrowing from the commercial banks, it means credit expansion and inflation. If in the course of such an inflation the rise in commodity prices exceeds the rise in nominal wage rates, unemployment will drop. But what makes unemployment shrink, is precisely the fact that real wage rates are falling.

“The inherent tendency of capitalist evolution is to raise real wage rates steadily. This is the effect of the progressive accumulation of capital by means of which technological methods of production are improved. There is no means by which the height of wage rates can be raised for all those eager to earn wages other than through the increase of the per capita quota of capital invested. Whenever the accumulation of additional capital stops, the tendency toward a further increase in real wage rates comes to a standstill. If capital consumption is substituted for an increase in capital available, real wage rates must drop temporarily until the checks on a further increase in capital are removed.

Government measures which retard capital accumulation or lead to capital consumption—-such as confiscatory taxation—-are therefore detrimental to the vital interests of the workers.”
- BillW. | 10/05/2011 @ 07:54

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Stimulus Wasn’t Manly EnoughTuesday, October 4th, 2011

Stimulus Wasn’t Manly Enough
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011