Biden: "We Misread the Economy"

SergeantPsycho said:
It's not crap when applied thoroughly and properly, see the "Asian Tigers", Texas and Ireland. You'll have bubbles that burst, sure, but that's a healthy economic adjusting itself, no pun intended.

Katieesq said:
Erm, well, first of all you're not exactly right, though I suppose that depends on what you mean by infrastructure. The Washington post provided a beautiful breakdown of where stimulus package funds were allocated. What I'm trying to find information on is how much of this money has been spent, if any significant amount, and who are the companies or organizations who are doing the spending. My thinking is that if, say, 30% of the funds had been spent, it makes sense that in a few months the full impact of the stimulus would be fulfilled. Alternately, if more of the money has been spent, it's harder to justify waiting for the stimulus to kick in. If little of the money has been spent we have another problem entirely.

Infrastructure can be defined as the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function.

gfvella said:

My rellies in Texas tell me things there are holding up relatively well. However; before you put that down to your preferred sweet of political philosophies I would point that Texas the popular view of the Texan tax system is not entirely accurate not entirely accurate. For instance, Texas does have an income tax, even if it calls it a Franchise tax and it has a relatively narrow base. Texas is also benefiting from the fact that it's major industries are not those most directly affected by the downturn; is the US's biggest exporter; and its energy and defence industries have been booming for years. Defense industries continue to boom as the US government continues to pour money down the drain in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you consider government defence spending as government stimulus then Texas is riding on a wave of government money and has been for years.

About Ireland, well the reality is that they are fucked.. If you are suggesting that ireland's success in the last twenty years was partially due to low taxes, low wages and low regulation then you are correct, but that came with a lot of downsides. Specifically low taxes, wages and regulation are a race to the bottom if they are your main competitive advantage to attract investment. Ireland was competing with developing world economies for investment and that was never going to work in the long run. The boom the Irish government created was unsustainable and fed almost entirely by imported money and the result is that they have bugger all capital, screwed services and now a ballooning debt that will require massive tax hikes.

As for the Asian Tigers, well they owe more in common to command economies than they do to free market economies. Their drivers, like Ireland, were low wages and low regulation - especially of labour - as much as they were low taxes. It was certainly not the case that these government and states did not get into debt. The 1997 Asian Economic crisis was when there over indebtedness, deliberately under valued currencies and export dependence came back to bite them on the arse. Since then they have changed a lot of how they manage their economies, which is one reason why a lot of business moved to China in the late 90s.

I note that you did not include China in your list of economies to emulate Sarge: why not? Low tax; low regulation; no labour unions: what is there not to like?

gfvella said:

From the good people at Wiki:

From this definition then 151.9 billion of the stimulus package is directly infrastructure spending and I will bet the majority of the 79 billion going to the states and 20 billion going to health and human services will also go into infrastructure. A lot of the rest will be as well I suspect. Politicians love to build things; goes down very well with the punters and your doners.

That aside, the reason I brought it up is that building new highways etc take a lot of time to get started; twelves months is moving quickly. So I suspect that most of this money is still waiting to be spent.

A lot of the stimulus packages purpose is psychological; about letting people know the government is doing something and the numbers being thrown round making them go 'wow!'.

According to an analysis by The New York Times of 5,274 transportation projects approved so far — the most complete look yet at how states plan to spend their stimulus money — the 100 largest metropolitan areas are getting less than half the money from the biggest pot of transportation stimulus money. In many cases, they have lost a tug of war with state lawmakers that urban advocates say could hurt the nation’s economic engines.

Professor Gutfreund said that in some states the distribution was driven by statehouse politics, with money spread to the districts of as many lawmakers as possible, or given out as political favors. In others, he said, the money is distributed by formulas that favor rural areas or that give priority to state-owned roads, often found far outside of urban areas.

TheFuckOffKid said:
SargeWorld does not recognise China.

White House officials estimate that the government has committed $158 billion for spending around the country, but only about one-third of that has been spent. Temporary tax cuts have totaled about $43 billion thus far, according to White House estimates.