Lessons from the Stimulus Plan: There Is A Better Way by Of Thee I Sing 1776 The near collapse of our financial institutions and the overall economy

http://biggovernment.com/oftheeising/2010/07/23/lessons-from-the-stimulus-plan-theres-a-better-way/
Lessons from the Stimulus Plan: There Is A Better Way
by Of Thee I Sing 1776

The near collapse of our financial institutions and the overall economy and the misguided notion that a few trillion dollars of additional federal spending would return us to prosperity moved us in early 2009 to suggest an alternate approach. We proposed in an essay published in The American, the on-line journal of the American Enterprise Institute, a fifty percent tax credit up to a fixed limit for every taxpayer who purchased any consumer goods anywhere in the United States.

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Our theory was that a robust economic recovery would be fueled by increased retail purchases, and that every dollar of cost to the treasury represented a prior retail purchase within the American economy. This, by definition, would have produced an immediate increase in revenues to our struggling business and manufacturing sectors. That essay and the positive feedback it engendered provided the impetus for the establishment of the Of Thee I Sing 1776 website, the goal of which has been to produce weekly, timely, and hopefully, thought provoking essays.

This week we return to the subject of economic stimulus as more and more politicians from both sides of the aisle and columnists from left to right have pronounced the stimulus a disappointment, at best, and a disaster at worst. More likely, given the nation’s accumulated debt, the latter may be the more apt description.

So is there a Plan B, so to speak, in the works? The answer so far, based on bills recently considered and rejected by members of both parties in Congress, is that Mr. Obama would prefer to double down on the discredited Keynesian approach which didn’t work during the great depression and which failed miserably through the recently “ended” (at least by common definition) great recession. Tell the 9.5% of the workforce who are still unemployed that the recession is over. Tell that to those who have watched the average time the unemployed are out-of-work grow from six weeks to 12 weeks, to 25 weeks to 35 weeks.

The number of unemployed is essentially the same percentage of people who were unemployed before the Administration and the huge Democratic majority in Congress, in the name of “job creation”, started shoveling our tax money out the door (or as some might say burning it in a bonfire). And just why won’t President Obama, Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi wake up and smell the fire that continues to burn? The answer can be found in two very telling and, now, very familiar utterances of the president and his senior staff in the early days of the new Administration. The president said he wanted to “fundamentally change America” and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, when economic disaster was around the corner, famously said, “Never waste a crisis.”