http://the-american-catholic.com/2009/06/10/the-stimulus-bill-and-jobs/ Politics and Culture from a Catholic perspective. Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:21:28 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://the-american-catholic.com/2009/06/10/the-stimulus-bill-and-jobs/#comment-2660 Why the Fiscal Lunacy? « The American Catholic Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:20:01 +0000 http://the-american-catholic.com/?p=9584#comment-2660 [...] the-stimulus-bill-and-jobs/ [...] [...] the-stimulus-bill-and-jobs/ [...]

]]> http://the-american-catholic.com/2009/06/10/the-stimulus-bill-and-jobs/#comment-2659 More Biden Merriment « The American Catholic Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:36:54 +0000 http://the-american-catholic.com/?p=9584#comment-2659 [...] Joe could look at this post if he is curious as to the actual job impact of the vast sums of money he is responsible [...] [...] Joe could look at this post if he is curious as to the actual job impact of the vast sums of money he is responsible [...]

]]> http://the-american-catholic.com/2009/06/10/the-stimulus-bill-and-jobs/#comment-2658 Ivan Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:54:21 +0000 http://the-american-catholic.com/?p=9584#comment-2658 For a country with the current living standards of the USA the stimulus programme is misguided. During the Depression working men and women were desperate for any kind of work to keep hunger at bay, some of them even left for the Soviet Union in their search for a living wage. (Their fate was a terrible one.) It made sense in those days to finance road building and similar projects. On the one hand the roads and dams would pay for themselves by stimulating demand for cars and electrical products, on the other the expectations of the workers were quite low. This is the reason why countries well within the boundaries of technical posibilities such as India and China can get substantial returns on their infrastructure investments. But such is not the case for the mature economies already operating at the frontiers of production curves. For such economies it is better to cut business taxes and provide a direct subsidy to companies to retain their workers till the business climate improves. Given his luck, I expect Obama to get a boost from a purely secular turn of the business cycle which he'll claim is due to his spending binge. For a country with the current living standards of the USA the stimulus programme is misguided. During the Depression working men and women were desperate for any kind of work to keep hunger at bay, some of them even left for the Soviet Union in their search for a living wage. (Their fate was a terrible one.) It made sense in those days to finance road building and similar projects. On the one hand the roads and dams would pay for themselves by stimulating demand for cars and electrical products, on the other the expectations of the workers were quite low. This is the reason why countries well within the boundaries of technical posibilities such as India and China can get substantial returns on their infrastructure investments. But such is not the case for the mature economies already operating at the frontiers of production curves. For such economies it is better to cut business taxes and provide a direct subsidy to companies to retain their workers till the business climate improves. Given his luck, I expect Obama to get a boost from a purely secular turn of the business cycle which he’ll claim is due to his spending binge.

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