Political Poll

[rowyn]

I've been reading here and there about the economic stimulus bill in Congress, but not very much about it in LJ. Which made me curious what my friends think of it. Hence, a quickie poll!

[Poll #1346426]

Also, if any of you are so inclined, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts in detail. :)

Comments

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Didn't Japan already try something similar to this? I vaguely recall that it went badly.

In general, I figure that spending money we don't have (conjuring up money from nowhere) is a very bad thing. It makes the existing money worth less. Maybe diverting spending from one place to another could work; who knows?

I am not so strong in my opinion on this as I am on certain other issues, but I am worried that we will end up paying for this - and that even if this IS the cause of later woe, the mechanics of an economy are messy enough and subject to enough interpretation that we'll never know with absolute certainty. (At least, nobody is ever going to 'fess up to being responsible if it goes badly, if there's an alternative explanation in circulation.)

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Didn't Japan already try something similar to this?

No. When Japan's housing bubble bust in the late 80s, their first key objective was to allow the banks to avoid writing the bad assets down on their balance sheets, which would have forced a lot of banks to admit that they were technically insolvent. Our bankers have been howling, asking that they be allowed to do the same thing, but our regulatory agencies have thus far largely failed to give them what they asked for.

I figure that spending money we don't have (conjuring up money from nowhere) is a very bad thing. It makes the existing money worth less.

All money is a promise to perform future work. Money is only worth what people will do for you for it. If the money supply expands by people choosing to take on debt, that does not necessarily make all of the existing money worth less. If the money supply expands simply by the money-creating agents choosing to print it, then that does necessarily make all of the existing money worth less.

'We' will definitely end up paying for this, since the only place that the gov't can recoup the monies that they're spending now will be to tax the populace in the future to pay for those monies. However, what they're trying to accomplish by spending that money now is to time-shift the pain - better to undergo a fair bit of pain over time, in the future, than to undergo so much pain right now that we dislocate large swaths of the populace while the economy restructures.

I'm ok with that trade.