George Rebane

The $787B, or was it really $868B, stimulus called ARRA has not worked.  No matter the trumpeting from the front door, this is apparent now even to the White House which is conducting backdoor discussions on how to ‘double down’ on the next stimulus that is being cooked up.  We have quietly entered into the age of planned ‘eternal emergency’ during which a never-ending stream of Keynesian dollars are borrowed or printed, and then carefully ‘invested’ with correctly voting constituencies.

We all recall the cry that went out to the sheeple in February 2009.  The inherited Bush economy was in such a dump that $787B had to be rushed through Congress that very same weekend so it could be poured over a land of upturned faces waiting for help from Washington.  Perhaps the biggest selling point was that if we didn’t do this immediately, then we would be laying off police, firefighters, and teachers across the country, and quickly turning America into a land of free-ranging criminals, unattended conflagrations, and young people even dumber than public education has managed to make them in the last thirty years.

President Obama went on record at least six times to assure us that ARRA monies would be rushed to these critical job categories to keep our civilization from collapsing.   So what happened?  Well, today $451B or over 57% of the ARRA monies remain unallocated (see Nevada County’s reflection of this above).  And now, before the November elections, the transformational trio of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi are calling an extraordinary session of Congress to ram through an additional $26B that is suddenly necessary to guarantee (fasten seatbelts) that teachers!! will not be laid off in the coming school year.

In the meantime the country continues with legions of staffers at all levels of jurisdictions and non-profits (and even for-profits) spending millions of man-hours researching, writing, and evaluating ARRA proposals to get their hands on this promised largesse.  Only your imagination can tell what all these people could have done for the economy had they spent these hours in productive pursuits.  Generating and exchanging kilotons of paper and terabytes of pdf files to chase after created cash is a true and enduring example of how government creates and ‘saves’ jobs.

[8aug2010 update]  Wonder of wonders, even Democratic officials are beginning to doubt the effects of printing ever more money.  Robert Rubin, president Clinton’s Sec Treasury, stated on CNN that more government stimulus would now be “counter productive”.  I wonder how much past the ‘productive boundary’ we have actually come with all these trillions.