cruise ships

rate

contribution

If there is no way to know, then you cannot know if the money was squandered. Hopefully your business makes more sense.

--











> if it
> helped, it sure wasn't much.
> 
> There's no doubt that squandering a trillion dollars or two per year
> *will* do long-term harm.
> 
> That's another problem with Keynesian stimulus: politicians like it so
> much, they do it forever.
> 
>

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The interesting question is, when? The recovery after the 1929 crash didn't start until 1933, under the influence of Roosevelt's New Deal. James Arthur doesn't believe this, but he's a member of a small group of sceptics, al of whom seem to have a political axe to grind.

After the Japanese property bubble burst in 1991, their economy remained depressed until at least 2003.

In the first quarter after the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the US GNP shrank by 1.6% - roughly the same rate as it shrank after the 1929 crash. Bush's stimulus spending stopped the decline, and Obama continued the same policy.

The US GNP has been rising steadily, if not dramatically, ever since, at much the same rate as is was rising before the house-price bubble burst.

The ostensible rise in GNP that took place while the house price bubble was developing represents people investing time and money in building unnecessary houses that they thought they could sell at a profit, because your demented banking system was making ninja house loans to anybody who asked for them - that investment was a dead loss.

Not as much long term harm as letting GNP collapse by 25% - which it did between 1929 and 1933. Factories that close and businesses that shout down are worth a lot less as bankrupt stock than they were as going concerns,

That's James Arthur's delusion. Deficit spending in an economy that's running close to capacity doesn't help - it just creates an inflationary demand for goods and services that are already fully committed, rather than mobilising under-employed people and equipment.

Anybody with even a slightly better grasp of economics than James Arthur is aware of this.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's a linear chart. Growth is an exponential function. Plotted as a percentage, the drop is plain. You've been fooled.

Obama's 2013 budget, on my screen as I write, continues the deficit spending, increases it, adds to it, and carries this indefinitely (adds it to the baseline budget).

And, it's full of lies. Factor those out, and it's worse.

You might try checking the facts before posting. Or not.

James Arthur

The other problem with Keynesian stimulus is that the world has changed and is pretty much a global economy. So some of the U.S. stimulus money goes overseas and does not have the advertised multiplier effect.

=20 Dan

But it's really helping jobs in Finland...

"...the Karma is on sale with prices starting at $103,000.

[...]

About 1,500 of those cars, assembled in a factory in Finland, have now been built and about 300 are in customers' driveways..."

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Right. Borrowing to boost consumer spending creates jobs in Korea and adds to our cumulative balance of payments problem.

The "multiplier effect" never made much sense. For every dollar of government spending that is input to the mythical multiplier machine,

1.5 or so tax dollars is extracted from that same multiplier gadget. And much of the multiplier money is wasted. Look at the incredible home weatherization program, for example.

--

John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Where they will languish most of the time, whilst charging.

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)

s

Don't be silly. Growth is a couple of percent per year - over a few years linear and exponential are indistinguishable. I note that you haven't linked us to a pair of graphs that illustrate the difference, because it's imperceptible.

o

Until the economy has recovered enough not to need it ...

It's full of things you don't agree with. They probably aren't even wrong, let alone lies.

As opposed to looking at a white sheet, and declaring it black, which is more your speed.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

But then again, other people stimulus money ends up in the US, and gives you a free multiplier effect.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That money would have to go to people who weren't poor enough. The dirt poor have to spend it on food and housing. Once you've got enough to eat and have a roof over your head, then you can start spending money on consumer durables

To John Larkin, who doesn't know much about stuff outside of electronics, and uncritically soaks up the right-wing drivel he runs into in the "news" media he follows.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Idiot. The US is running a huge foreign-trade deficit. So consumer-spending stimulus is a losing game.

--

John Larkin, President
Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

so

.

If so, then you and Barack think 13 years won't be enough to prime the pump. You're probably right.

As Keynes predicted, we'll be dead long before.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

it so

's

nt.

What makes you say that? I've got no idea when the US economy will be far enough out of recession not to need stimulation - last month's unemployment figures were better than expected at 8.3%. so presumably it's a bit closer than 13 years.

s+unemployment+rate

I imagine that you are being equally irresponsible - if not actively mendacious - in claiming that Barack Obama thinks that its going to take 13 years to get the US economy back on track.

Granting that I've not got anything to do with that 13-year number, this is a bizarre proposition, even for you.

What Keynes said, was "that in the long term, we'll all be dead", which had nothing to do with appropriate duration for deficit financed economic stimulus packages.

This is not a subject area in which you have any expertise, since you don't understand how it works and in fact believe that it doesn't work at all, which leaves you free to make any number of other fatuous statements on the subject.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Only if a significant part of were actually spent overseas. As I seem to have mentioned before, the ideal recipient for stimulus spending is so dirt poor that they have to spend the money on food and housing, both domestically produced.

If the stimulus money gets into the hands of people with enough to eat and a roof over their heads, they can spend some of it on consumer durables, but even then most of the money they pay out stays with the US importers and the retailers - the retail mark-up on consumer durables is rather large.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

e it so

at's

ment.

Why not try checking the facts, Obama's new budget? It's in the summary tables.

Not only has Obama's 28% stimulus-hike not been withdrawn (spending keeps going up), but his ten-year outlook continues to pile on more on top of the 3 years we've already endured.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

e it so

at's

ment.

...

You've been duped yet again. Click on "Labor force", and note that flat spot on the right side of the graph.

Unemployment is falling because, despite population increase, they're holding the labor force steady. It's a neat manipulation. If you don't count people as employable, you don't have to count them as unemployed.

Next try clicking on "Employment," and project the historical trend to today to see a) where we should be employment-wise, and b) that the current rate *increases* the gap over time. IOW, at this rate of growth, real unemployment will continue increasing.

Nice graphs, BTW.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

There's tons of housing, public and private, and the biggest food problem that poor people have here is obesity.

--

John Larkin, President
Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

so

The other big 0'lie is the "birth/death model".

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Not as effectively as you'd like to think. Where did those 13 years come from.

I'm supposed to care about the rococo details of you unemployment statistics? The headline figures are getting better - end of story.

And if you don't feed them well enough as kids to let them absorb what education is available, they really do get to be unemployable when they grow up. A major problem with US society as it is now organised is that the people with money won't invest enough of it in their local work force - they prefer to exploit workers overseas, where they can use them up and throw them out before moving on to the next country. You are surprised that work-force participation is falling and US prison incarceration rates are the highest in the world? It's all a logical consequence of the right-wing rubbish you peddle.

Neglecting technological change?

Reflecting US enthusiasm for "free trade" aka off-shoring jobs.

"Real" unemployment being the rate that you concoct out of the published data to support your political point of view.

Google does seem to have found someone who understands the art of making data look pretty. The actual sequence of booms and busts that the data records is less admirable. The last two are the dot-com bubble and the sub-prime house price bubble. which don't say much for the wisdom of the free (as in giddy) market or the dexterity of the invisible hand.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen