Tuesday, January 20, 2009

So Much For Science

Remember how the Bush administration was constantly accused of letting ideology get in the way of research?

Turns out they had nothing on the Obama one.
Top Obama economic adviser Christina Romer has studied 20th-century recessions and concluded that monetary tools, not fiscal spending, produced recoveries. Even in the Great Depression, monetary expansion, not FDR's public works, opened the way toward recovery beginning in the spring of 1933.

But wait -- it gets even better.
Now, though, Romer and other Obama advisers are betting that the $825 billion package under consideration in the House will be big enough to alter the history that they've all studied.

They are also betting on the fact that a package divided between $550 billion in spending and $275 billion in tax cuts will be the right mix, even though Romer's research also shows tax cuts to have a larger multiplier effect on the economy than spending.

Now we've reached the point of ludicrous.

The New Deal has been invoked for six months as proof that rampant government spending works to slow or stop recessions -- only to have it admitted that government spending really didn't do anything to slow or stop the Great Depression.

Tax cuts have been determined to provide more bang for the buck than government spending -- so Obama is doing double the spending and half the tax cuts, deficit and value be damned.

These people have zero concept of reality. They don't want to fix the economy; they want to spend government money.

From where, exactly, do they intend to get that money?

No comments: