Midterms

I agree. During the Bachmann (R-MN) debate I was listening to the other day she said on a few occasions that TARP and the stimulus did nothing and in fact costs us jobs (something that is simply unprovable) while her D opponent said nothing except that if she was in Congress she would've voted against TARP. I think it needs to be emphasized that TARP was a bipartisan proposal put forward by the Republican Admin. at the time and supported by all the Congressional leaders, including Boehner. Also it need to be reminded that most of the large banks had paid back TARP (at a profit to the US), and AIG is on its way to paying it back. Also Ford and GM are turning profits and Chrysler is owned by Fiat not the US government.

Its basically revisionist history for the Congressional Republicans to be taking a stand on TARP now when their party supported it.

 

You can spout off lies as long as you're convinced they're true...

 

Fixed.

 

And when the other side is scared to set the record straight.

 

Are you subtracting all the jobs lost from adding so much to the national debt?

 

Which jobs were lost from that?

 

The more you increase national debt, the more tax payers are going to sit on their money, thus less jobs. What do you do when you know you have a big bill coming soon? I would assume you save your money and spend nothing like most people.

 

Yes, which is why a targeted stimulus gives people more money to spend as long as it goes to the middle class and below rather than to the wealthy. But you have a huge task if you're going to tie people's lack of spending into the fact that they are worried about the national debt rather than current unemployment, housing market crash, fear for job security etc., and then show that the fear of national debt as opposed to those other issues caused spending to fall off that it cost a specific number of jobs.

 

Not really. Democrats have proposed numerous times to raise taxes on the rich(employers). For most Democrats, that is their plan to solve the national debt. So if I am an employer, I sit on my money knowing the law-makers are trying to raise my taxes and stick me with a big bill. Not that complicated really. Your are correct in saying the housing market crash helped.

 

If you are employer who knows what you are doing, you don't hire anyone unless there is a stimulus from the govt.

You don't hire people because the economy is bad and people are saving their money and not buying much product or services right now. Hiring people wouldn't make sense whether the govt. was raising taxes on the wealthy or not. The stimulus helps people spend money which, if it goes on long enough and is correctly targeted, would give employers reason to hire people.

 

History says otherwise. Stimulus gets passed and unemployment increases.

 

I'm not sure what history you are talking about. The history I've seen including the great depression says stimulus works. Sadly, partway through the great depression and the new deal they cut back on the stimulus and the unemployment went back up.

But I believe in almost every industrialized nation since the 1950's stimulus has helped the economy.

I would be willing to look at some other historical data if you point me in the right direction.

 

Sure, the last two years.

 

so when reagan increased the debt and unemployment went down, maybe that was o'donnell witchcraft?

 

Looks like Obama and Bush, who both greatly increased the deficit, lost Americans tons of jobs.

 

Can you quantify that?

 

Actually it looks like as soon as the stimulus was passed, the trend of increasing job losses each month reversed.

 

So Bush manages to lose some 700 thousand in his last month and then Obama does even worse and loses another 600 thousand on top of that. Terrible.

 

This should be on billboards.