On Jun 3, 2011, at 1:06 PM, M Christol wrote: > >>>> It's time to try the tried and true methods of less government spending >>>> and a smaller public sector, lower taxes and fewer regulations to >>>> stimulate growth in the private sector. >>> When was this ever actually tried and proven true? >> Yes. Witness the first few hundred years of the US of A. And the roaring >> 20's. >> >> > baloney > All the resources were free for the original settlers & they had slave labor > to boot. Slightly different world. A lot of people died of disease & > starvation in the 1600s, too. > The loose credit (lack of regulation) of the roaring 20s (the first few years > of the 20s sucked, BTW) gave us the friggin depression.
Excuse me, but we're talking about the federal response to a depression, not whether the old times were better than now. It also helps to understand that economies are cyclical, going from good to bad. We underwent a depression in the 1910's. Coolidge stubbornly and rightfully failed to intervene. As a result depression was short lived, and the Roaring 20's. Contrast that with Hoover's f*ck up of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, his deflationary policies and his federal intervention to compensate for the drastic effect of those policies. The result was a miserable and prolonged economic depression that didn't end until World War II. The Bush-Obama response to a recession resulted in a double-dip recession which will very well result in a full-scale depression if it hasn't already. The automotive bailouts did nothing but rob corporate shareholders -- many of them elderly working class citizens -- to pay for union largesse. The cash-for clunkers program had no gross effect on car sales. It wasted lots of taxpayer money to induce those already in the market to buy a little earlier. The stimulus packages did nothing to benefit Main Street. As I noted previously, states, counties and cities used that money to meet public employee pension payment obligations and to defer layoffs of those employees. Very little if any of that money was used to fund "shovel ready" jobs of which there are many. Obama and the Democrats promised that such spending would prevent unemployment from exceeding 8%. Since then the official rate has soared above 10% and the unemployment+underemployment ratio has soared as high as 22% in some states. But you don't have to take my word for it. Just wait and see how many people are anxious to throw the boy wonder out of office in 2012 if these high unemployment numbers persist. They gambled on a new "green economy." So did California. The problem is one never developed. Green industries shored up the government are failing left and right. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "StrataList-OT" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/stratalist-ot?hl=en.
