But Gross is mostly dead-on here. When John Boehner can get by with saying something like “you can’t spend $800 billion of taxpayer money and not create jobs when you say that’s what the goal was,” it’s good for the press to point out that you can’t spend $800 billion of taxpayer money and not create jobs if you haven’t, you know, spent but a fraction of that $800 billion of taxpayer money yet.
Reporters should keep that in mind as they cover this multi-year story. When the stimulus bill was passed, its proponents were planning for a long, hard economic slog. They got that part right.
Right, but the bill passed eight months ago. Lots of people have lost their jobs since then. Lots have lost their homes. Had the stimulus been more front-loaded, we’d have a lower unemployment rate now.
But Ryan, that’s exactly how this gargantuan piece of shit bill was sold to us.
Don’t you remember the “millions of jobs that were to be created” (later modified to say “created or saved”) with the stimulus or the neat little graph
that the administration put out telling us what unemployment would look like with and without the stimulus?
The shitty thing about socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money to spend, but I suppose the fed could just print more.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Tue 13 Oct 2009 at 02:33 PM
re: Mike H: Argh! Enough with the "socialism" crap. We are not, in any way, living under a socialist system. That is a meaningless buzzword, used only to obscure what is actually a very complex situation.
#2 Posted by laura k, CJR on Tue 13 Oct 2009 at 05:17 PM
-The shitty thing about the statist wealth redistribution is that eventually you run out of other people’s money to spend, but I suppose the fed could just print more.
Just for Laura K
#3 Posted by Mike h, CJR on Tue 13 Oct 2009 at 05:30 PM