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

Re: We Need a Placebo -- Just Don't Call It That

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I disagree. Right now confidence is shot, but confidence is shot because the actual economic fundamentals suck. The US consumer and US businesses are both massively overleveraged. The US government is, somewhat ironically, much less leveraged than the average consumer. (That's good - if that were not the case, our gov't would be folding, and that would suck a lot more). The only way to reduce the amount of leverage is for the US consumer (and US businesses) to consume a lot less for a while, and pay down a bunch of that debt. However, we're so far out on a limb that if we try to do that all at once, the entire economy will go into a tailspin, which will both draw out the amount of time that it takes to pay down our (collective) debt, and make everyone's standard of living plummet. We'd like to avoid that, if we can.

Separately, the Bush administration and the Greenspan Federal Reserve tried to minimize the depth of the 2001 recession by creating an artificially low cost of borrowing. That caused a massive expansion in housing and construction over the period from 2001 - 2007. Unfortunately, that also means that an awful lot of people who needed to find either different jobs or different places to live or both in 2001 are needing to do that all at once now, instead. Worse yet, because of the artificially low cost of borrowing, more people kept moving in to those careers and locales that they needed to be moving out of in 2001 - so now the number of people who need to be relocated (within the economy and the country) is that much higher than it was in 2001, which means it's going to suck harder for them to shift, and that more people will be affected.

The point of the stimulus is to cushion a bunch of that blow, so that instead of having 15 million people all trying to find new jobs at the same time, we have a few million people all trying to find a job at the same time continually over the next few years. If anything, by slowing the process down, it will increase both the cost, and the number of people affected.

But it won't hurt nearly so much for the individuals affected along the way.
Given how much it would hurt to try and deal with 15 million people all being out of work at the same time, I'm ok with that trade, too.