Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Bridge. To. Nowhere. That's your stimulus. No transformative technology, no private sector picking-up of that "slack" on the other side. All you've done is buy a year of the status quo, for a trillion dollars. I agree with the stimulus because, well, none of us knew what was on the other side of that spending. It seemed a wise bet, and it was. Doing it again? Stupid beyond comprehension. Now it's Schumpeter's turn.
It is structural, and if you don't understand why, I'm not surprised the only point you can offer here time and time again is an uncreative borrowed argument about aggregate demand.
That was yesterday's argument, and though I remind you time and time again that, yes, the stimulus was a good idea then but that given what we have learned from it, another like it is not a wise idea now, you still repeat the same blunt talking point. Here's a tip: When arguing about a new stimulus, discuss the conditions now and how it will achieve long term results unlike the one we had before. Arguing points debated in 2008 is wasted breath. Either tell me what its a bridge to or concede its just purchasing the status quo for a period of time at risk of a monstrous collapse later. And if the best you can offer is, "It will buy us some time in which a new bubble can form," don't write back at all.
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Aggregate demand is still down. Private demand hasn't picked up the slack. If you're fighting a big fire, you don't stop in the middle and say, "Well we tried putting water on it, but now we need to do something different -- let's use gasoline."
You say, "it's structural." What's structural? What's your solution? You don't have a bridge to anywhere. You're suggesting blowing up what we do have in the hopes that it will somehow incentivize people to build a new and better bridge.
We have lots of unemployed people. We don't have parts of the economy that can't find workers. If we had a structural problem, you would see slack demand in some parts of the economy, and insufficient supply elsewhere. But there's slack demand everywhere. Interest rates can't fall enough to get us back to full employment. That's a problem of aggregate demand, still.
And the federal increases in spending merely offset cuts at the state and local level. So we haven't actually tried stimulus.
