The large number associated with the stimulus bill is being used as a boogey man with which to scare people. There are legitimate reasons for concern, but the number, taken in isolation isn’t one of them. I think I heard Boehner or someone talking about how the stimulus represents more than $2 million per day “since Christ was born.”
Leo Morris references a site that tells us “A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years,” before saying “when you see that actual enormous leap between a billion and a trillion, what the government is doing gets really scary.” That only works if a dollar spent by the government bears a relationship to a second. By contrast, as a counterexample, a mere drop of water has 1.5 sextillion molecules.
Now, if you assume — as our government officials currently are — that government spending can have a positive impact on economic activity and that the Gross Domestic Product of the economy is a reasonable way of measuring the size of the economy, then a more plausible comparison is government spending as a percentage of GDP. Another assumption (stacking one on top of the other gets precarious, I know — but this is a free blog, so you get what you pay for) is that World War II got us out of The Great Depression. World War II resulted in a 34% increase in government spending as a percentage of GDP (from about 9.8% in 1940 to 43.6% in 1943-1944). In 2008, the United States had an estimated GDP of about $14.58 trillion.
I don’t know if the real change (+34%) in government spending or the absolute amount of government spending (43.6%) was considered most important in getting us out of the Depression. As of 2003, we were at about 20%. A 23% increase in government spending as a percentage of GDP would mean about $3.3 trillion in additional spending. So, if any of this analysis is valid, it may well be that the $800 billion in the stimulus bill will be insufficient. (And, of course, there is the tiny matter of *what* we’re spending it on.)
Yeah- the tiny matter of what we’re spending it on.
My opinion of the WW2 spending is that the large measure of the benefit of it is that the money went widely across the populace in manufacturing jobs, in exchange for actual production.
I am in no way convinced that the money from the stimulus will be so widely spread across the populace, and even less convinced that it will be in exchange for actual production.
I am sometimes quite perplexed by you, Doug. I find it fascinating that you can at once send a sort of pre-emptive strike in the general direction of anyone who might be inclined to doubt the stimulus, and at the same time post a status update via Twitter that goes ‘Today’s reforms are tomorrow’s corruption’. I mean, how do you reconcile the two?
I don’t fault people for doubting the stimulus. I have my own doubts. I do, however, feel like there are some, the House Republicans in particular, who have a very cynical quality to their doubts. In other words, I fully understand that people of good will can honestly believe that this will be an unproductive or destructive policy. But the ones who are spinning out scary noises about how the numbers relate to dollars spent since Jesus walked the earth are just engaging in political theater.
As to my suggestion about the nature of reform and corruption, I guess I take more a thesis/antithesis/synthesis view of these things. Any static system is going to degrade. So, you have to avoid stasis.
By the same token, I assume that the newly empowered Democrats will sooner or later (hopefully later) lose their vitality and corruption or stagnation will overwhelm any good ideas they may have had. At that time, I hope that the Republicans or some other party has some energy and good ideas and push the Democrats out of power.
Well, the Republicans don’t have a leg to stand on, after the spending of the Bush years, to suddenly and unanimously oppose a bill that, had it been presented to their majority by their president, they would have eagerly passed.
Rise and fall is the history of the two-party (cough) system. Clinton enjoyed his majorities for one House term. The blowback against the Democratic Congress gave way to the 1994 Republican resurgence. Now, I don’t see any of these pendulum swings as ‘change’, just mere pendulum swings. I wish the American people had a genuine apetite for change, rather than a superficial one that is shown by the pendulum.
Well said, Mike.
Y’know, the outgoing President mouths that inanity–at least twice–about “peaceful transfer of power” (USA! Over 150 Years Without A Bloody, Senseless Civil War Over Human Chattel!), which is particularly piquant coming from a man whose own ascension to power was somewhat short of what any of us would have hoped for.
And twenty-minutes later the remnants of his party are plotting the destruction of the new regime.
Which is fine. The problem isn’t that the waters are roiled. The problem is we can’t find wisdom anywhere when we need it. The system is broken, and the things that have broken it–too much money and the insane elections it funds, too much advantage granted incumbents, too much reward for gridlock, fluffy, issue-free coverage from major news sources, an ill-informed electorate with a choice of which party it wants to misrepresent it–are damned resistant to being uprooted; and our only tool at this point is citizen journalism.
term limits….it’s the simplest most effective tool to stop the lifelong “appointments” we now have. House & Senate seats were never designed to be life long careers.
The greatest American political tragedy of the twentieth century may have been when term limits were imposed on the executive branch – without being imposed on the legislative and judicial branches.
Two terms and out – with no pension you didn’t pay for!
It’s also worth considering the cost of doing nothing. The erosion in the value of assets in the marketplace has had a pretty massive toll. If the economy is successfully stabilized, some asset values should recover and that will counterbalance a lot of spending too.
Spending and investing aren’t quite the same either. The interstate highway system was expensive, but it also created a lot of wealth because of the development the it spawned along those corridors. Not all good, of course, but the point is investment in infrastructure helps drive the economy.
It would be nice if we’d spend money building stuff here instead of bombing stuff elsewhere.
Term Limits sound nice on the surface, but where would we be with amateurs working on foreign policy every 2 years. I’m for populism, right up until we need to be pragmatic.
I would much rather have Richard Lugar, who I rarely agree with, working on the foreign relations committee than some boob who got into office because his turn finally came up. If we exhaust all of our decent candidates, some idiot is going to make it by default.
I certainly don’t want someone like that nut that beat Bob Garton ascending to the US Senate.
Let’s see, Chris. Umm. Not much worse off than what we get from supposed “experts”. Same with CEOs. Same with the economy.
The most important thing in foregin policy is consistency, not “expertise”, especially when said “expertise” is suspect.
Term limits would give lobbyists and bureaucrats more power than they have currently. Both would have access to the relatively green politicians and both would have information the legislators would rely upon to make decisions.
I’m not one of those who thinks that lobbyists and bureaucrats are inherently evil, so maybe an argument could be made whatever downside there is to their increased power is offset to the benefits of cleaning out lawmakers before they get entrenched.
It strikes me as humorous that so many of those calling for term limits are the same people who support these southern-brand conservative congressmen and elected officials who stay in office for generations. Now if we could pass a law that liberal office holders have term limits ,but leave the conservatives in peace to do their job….