Looks like GM will file bankruptcy.

[HappySqurriel]

akuma587 said:

So...the economy was actually worse off than the Obama administration predicted. To me, that sounds like the need for a stimulus was even greater than people thought. There is no reason that these job loss numbers could not have continued to accelerate upwards of 12-15% given the right circumstances (like a collapse of the financial sector). The actual data is more suggestive of that kind of effect with an overall much deeper arc of unemployment.

Economics is not an exact science. The writer of the article presumes that simply because the Obama adminstration lowballed how bad unemployment actually would get that they are somehow at fault (and that all the other predictions they made were correct). He holds the fact that the economy actually turned out to be worse than the Obama administration expected against them. That doesn't really make any sense to me. He then turns around and assumes that all the other predictions the administration made were correct. How about if he ADJUSTED the curve for the ACTUAL numbers.

 

Here is a simple question for you, is there any evidence that the stimulus package worked or any way to measure the impact the stimulus package had on the economy? Is there any way to conclusively say that the economy was worse off than these economists expected, or that we would have been in a worse position without a stimulus package?

For thousands of years we have had Doctors of some form, and people would come to these Doctors in a moment of crisis and beg them to do something because "We can’t afford to do nothing" ... An interesting thing about this is that until very recently (past 100 years or so) a Doctor was far more likely to make your condition worse from their action than doing nothing would have. In a moment of crisis there is always a bias towards action, and without the education and experience teaching you to do the smallest and most focused actions possible to alleviate the crisis you’re probably going to do more harm than good.

Sadly enough, economists are generally over-educated, under-experienced, academics who have made a career out of creating theories and testing them on computer models that were built based on their theories. In the moment of crisis they are like a doctor with a patient who came in with a black-eye and a nasty cut on their head and the doctor immediately proposes brain surgery because there was the possibility that there is massive bleeding in the brain ... Unfortunately, in the case of an economist, when people follow this advice and something bad happens there is no malpractice lawsuits and people will even automatically assume that things would have been worse without taking the foolish action.