| agardini51 said: The thing that bugs me about some of these people is the fact that they keep complaining that the Government is spending way too much money and the fact that the stimulus was a waste of money. All of the people that I know that complain about the stimulus money spent it right away. If they really thought it was a bad idea they should have shipped the checks right back to the Treasury. And when in a recession the Government has to spend money to try and pull it out, and then save up money when things are going good. It's pretty basic economics. Another thing that bugs me is the people who think it was a bad idea to save the banks and the car companies. If they think now is bad, how bad would the economy be with no banks, no mortgage companies, and no car companies. Talk about a depression.. The next two years will probably get nothing accomplished if the Repubs take control of Congress as they have already stated that they will not compromise on anything what so ever. It will be a sad day if they do get control. (And this all coming from a person who did not vote for Obama in the election.) I honestly think that he has done a decent enough job considering all that is going on. |
Th simple truth is that the government is spending too much money ...
Total government spending in the United States is approaching 45% of GDP, with a federal deficit at 10% of GDP, and gross public debt approaching 120% of GDP; and these are all levels which are dangerous. With spending so high the government is crowding out private industry, and the size of government debt indicates that the US is close to defaulting and that risk is growing very rapidly due to the size of the deficit.
Now, the government spent hundreds of billions of dollars on stimulus in order to create jobs and it had no measureable impact on jobs. There is no way to know what the job market would have been like without the stimulus, but it is certainly understandable to suggest that things wouldn't be much worse being that the unemployment rate is lower than the government's worst case projection.
