51 percent believe canceling the rest of the stimulus money would create more jobs.That is insane.
It's one thing to say that canceling the rest of the stimulus money would help our deficit. That's arguable, even if I think it's dead wrong, since the best way to help our deficit is to put people back to work when demand is nonexistent so that they (1) receive taxable income and (2) spend that taxable income on products to help other people's taxable income. In our 2009 deficit, $300 billion came from lower tax receipts, $100 billion came from stimulus tax cuts and about $100 billion came from stimulus spending. One hundred billion. Blaming the January stimulus for the $1.4 trillion deficit like blaming a pack of Skittles for a cavity.
The idea that canceling the stimulus would create more jobs implies that passing the stimulus has actually killed more jobs than it's created, which is bonkers. Let's say you don't want to consider infrastructure spending or green technology spending or a single job that might have been created in the private sector. If nothing else, the tens of billions we've sent to state budgets have, without question, saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, like teachers, that are supported by state taxes. It's just a very basic fact.
So this is a crazy statistic, but I think it's important to ask why Americans think the stimulus is actually hurting job-creation. It's a dumb thing to think, but it must be coming from somewhere. I worry that it's things like this.
Where is the money coming from? Taxes or future taxes. Who pays taxes? When people have less money do to a higher tax burden, do they spend less?
Since the stimulus is borrowed money (future taxes), there will be less jobs in the future.
Even the CBO says so.
"the best way to help our deficit is to put people back to work when demand is nonexistent"
Maybe the question wasn't about the deficit, which your answer is maybe correct if the question was about the deficit. The questions was, I guess, about jobs, and maybe folks don't see the stimulus spending as creating any jobs.
I mean, stop 100 people walking out of WalMart on Saturday and ask if they know anyone working because of stimulus spending.
Maybe someone knows someone who is working because of stimulus spending. Maybe no one knows anyone with a job because of stimulus spending.
I've been reading Derek Thompson with amazement for weeks now, but finally had to make a comment. How this man is writing for the business section of the Atlantic is beyond me...or maybe not.
Yes, the American people are mostly stupid, or more specifically, selectively intelligent. They do not apply their critical reasoning evenly across the board. When it comes to politics, otherwise non-retarded folks will hold disturbing, non-nonsensical opinions. I know these people. A lot of them simply refuse to admit the stimulus or X,Y or Z can do anything positive simply because it came from Obama's loins, period.
But Thompson is basing much of his shock on the assumption that everyone sees, or should see, this stimulus from the same stunted, Keynesian perspective that he does, and he's wrong. Another item he might consider, is a fundamental reason we suffered this economic crisis in the first place.
The possibility that the boom-bust cycle has been amplified over and over by monetary and fiscal stimulus escapes Thompson. What set the stage for the housing BOOM and the inevitable crash to follow? The Bush-Greenspan "stimulus" of earlier this decade, which in fact "worked" according to Thompson's myopic standards, at the cost of...well, we know that now, don't we? The $1M question is what the true price of this stimulus will be...over the medium-long term...a thought that escapes Thompson, Keynesians in general and their short-term politics obsessed fellow travelers, but is a great concern to those of us who don't think in terms of election cycles.
Massive centrally planned re purposing of wealth to prop up a Potemkin economy, borrowed against future tax revenue from (real) American assets and labor does not come naturally to all of us as an automated response to a much deeper structural disorder of economics that plagues this country.
It is always assumed by the political class, which Thompson exemplifies, that the state only acts when markets have "failed" and when it does so, it actually "corrects" a "problem". Notice how many of his columns are headlined with several variations on a single conceit: "Can know-it-all wannabe social engineers (like myself) make things better? Of course!".
Never is the idea entertained that prior government intervention itself can be and often is the source of the very maladies Thompson and his ilk claim can only be solved by further intervention. The market has "failed" you see. Oh, and leaving the market alone to self-correct (novel idea) is "politically impossible". Politicians have to "do something", or at least appear to, or they'll lose their precious office. Grow, grow, grow the state. Down this path ultimately lies economic collapse and despotism. But thats the long term, Derek--you wouldn't understand...
You're not a Keynesian, it appears!
But what exactly are you saying, J?
Leave the market alone. OK, so don't spend anything. At the very least school budgets across the country are slashed to pieces and hundreds of thousands of public school teachers lose their jobs. Public education gets stripped to the bone. (How does the evisceration of public education work out in the long-term?) You say don't try to "correct" the problem and you're critical of not only the government but also Greenspan. I mean, I don't put Greenspan on a pedestal, but does that mean don't employ any sort of expansionary fiscal OR monetary policy? John Keynes and Milton Friedman would tag team all over that.
Do I understand the long-term impacts of the stimulus? No, not really. I'm not being facetious. I don't know what the 10 year impact of the stimulus is going to be on the dollar, on inflation, on quarterly GDP, on unemployment. Neither do you. All I know is that economic analysts from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs credit the stimulus for being the difference between 0 and 3.5% GDP growth in Q3.
So tell me: What would you do differently?
Maybe consider that education budgets are bloated. When times were good, and everyone was rolling in dough, teacher salaries rose too, as they probably should have. Now, times are tough, and everyone has wages frozen, or decreased, and what magic precludes educators or any state or federal employee from immunity in a downturn? Here in Georgia, teacher salaries range from $28700 to $53700. Salaries are primarily based on the employees education status. So a PhD teaching pre-K gets $53K and a teahcer with a bachelors degree teaching high schoolers gets a little under $28k.
The economics of paying under this type of structure is insane. It'd be like paying a master chef to crank out burgers from Mickey D's. Economically it's not viable.
In any event, educators would gladly take pay cuts to bring them in line with private sector pay and have them share the pain with their privately employed counterparts. Or would they be happier being unemployed? Wouldn't most people gladly work for a little less than not work or earn anything at all? I think individuals are quick learners of survival.
The bulk of the problems comes form the very valid perspective that "the big guys" got it all. Billions here, billions there, and none for me or any of my friends or family. And yes, the public does confuse the stimulus with the bailouts. Whether it's right for them to do so or not is another issue.
Well thanks for the measured reply. I take your point about education and basic social services needing a buffer zone. Whether one supports the current shape of our public institutions or not, any sudden shock to the system is likely to cause tons of turmoil. It also illustrates how ossified and non-resilient our social services have become, when the very prospect of a severe recession could be the death-knell of social cohesion in th modern world absent a huge injection of unaccountable IOUs.
Perhaps this whole episode can serve as as one of many rebuttals against the bureaucratization of education/social services as a sustainable model, let alone a dynamic one. Perhaps a more severe collapse would have rekindled a spirit of voluntarism and spontaneous cooperation in communities, as one sees after a hurricane. But you need common moral creed for that to work. I fear entitlement politics eroded that spirit a long time ago.
To your comment about Friedman--there was a man who waged war against central planning...except when it came to the supply and price of money. He never adequately justified that enormous contradiction, falling back on pragmatic arguments of political "realism". I spare no venom for the Chicagoan Monetarists, but as you say, they're in fundamental agreement with the Keynesian/neo-classical school when it comes to a theory of Capital. But Central Banking and the intrinsically unstable fractional reserve system that necessitates it pre-date either man, and is at root of why the financial sector so often precipitates massive disorders of resources.
As for understanding the long term impact of the stimulus...no one has a crystal ball, but one can attempt to extrapolate what the impact of other stimuluses have been, and multiply it by an order of magnitude. When most people still believe (and are taught in school) that only counter-cyclical government spending can save a market from itself, Sound economics is still fighting the battles of the last century. (some of your colleagues have woken up, only to find themselves shouting into a void):
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx
I suggest you take a look.
I don't give a #@$% what the investment banks say about GDP growth; they're the recipients of the greatest legal plunder in the history of man. I doubt most people trust how the government measures GDP anymore anyway--proclamations by government statisticians don't hold much water anymore. (We were only supposed to have 9% unemployment if absolutely nothing was done, as I recall).
The Establishment feathered their bed with credentialed experts from the finest schools--who's expertise was demolished by reality. The "fringes" were dismissed and berated for their radical exhortations--and they were damn right on the money. So in a world turned upside-down, where "kooks" seem to have a better understanding of economic principles and phenomena than a professor emeritus,
Why should we trust the conventional wisdom at all, if we ever did?
@Derek Thompson
It's a strawman to claim that school budgets would be slashed nationwide in the abscence of the stimulus. It would be political suicide for local politicians to cut education or public safety jobs or salary more than is absolutely necessary. I imagine the bulk of people who would lose their jobs are state employees working in other parts of state government.
Sometimes even people who write online articles are stupid.
Typical Keynesian economics. Squeeze the sector of the economy that produces wealth, and grow larger the sector of the economy that produces no wealth, that will surely fix things. People who say otherwise are clearly stupid, LOL.
Ask Japan how their government stimulus worked out in the 90s. Or even FDR's treasury secretary, who admitted on his way out that spending more money doesn't stimulate.
If the stimulus is working so very well, and the administration has all the answers, pray tell... why is the unemployment number a full 2 percentage points higher than the white house projected number if the stimulus *didn't* pass?
"More government. Works every time!"
Rob, half of the stimulus spending of 2009 was tax cuts.
237 billion out 787 billion is not half.
Rather, half of the "stimulus" was tax cuts.
Tax cuts are indeed a legitimate solution to economic stimulation, but work best when also followed by a corresponding decrease in spending (which we have seen none of), or else you're just racking up a large debt (which we have seen plenty of). Not helpful to the long-term economy, as j pointed out above me. Your obsession with the short term is killing the nation.
Ah, yes... what is that called? Voodoo Economics...
Yeah... slash government spending and every company that does business with the government loses the one big client that actually is buying things at the moment.
If tax cuts work so well, then Bush's tax cuts should have given us incredible prosperity... When 2/3rds of companies pay no taxes at all, tax cuts would do little to stimulate the economy as a whole.
rob4 -
The whole point is you're not squeezing any sector. We're in a liquidity trap, and we're struggling with a de facto price floor in the market for loanable funds. The fed funds rate is at zero, other interest rates are higher depending on the term structure and various risk premiums, but aside from those considerations they're basically as low as they can go too. The market for loanable funds can't adjust the price down any lower, and yet savings still considerably exceed private investment. That's a liquidity trap. And that means that the government can run deficits until the cows come home without "squeezing" anyone. If they were "squeezing" anyone, as you say, don't you think the bond markets would react more substantially than they are right now? You're taking an Econ 101 perspective of how the economy normally works and transposing it on some very unusual times that we're living in.
RE: "If the stimulus is working so very well, and the administration has all the answers, pray tell... why is the unemployment number a full 2 percentage points higher than the white house projected number if the stimulus *didn't* pass?"
Have you ever heard of the concept of a counterfactual? Google it.
Daniel. A few basic economic points here. As has been stated in other threads, that money has to come from somewhere. Taxes, borrowing, or printing. All of those options remove wealth from the private sector. Some of them more dramatically, some of them sooner rather than later. But you have to pay the piper eventually. The money is removed from one place, and put in another.
Now, there are 2 things wrong with stimulus. Gov't is the most ineffecient spender of wealth; you don't get a 1:1 return on your money when Uncle Sam spends it. By definition, you get less than what you are paying for. Also, the interest on the debt is money that you are taking away from the private sector and throwing down a hole. It doesn't do anything productive for the economy. That's lost jobs. Right there. Simple as pie.
Again - looking at the long term here, not the short term - stimulus is a bad idea, and by definition cannot create more than it removes. You're asking for a perpetual motion machine, with no transfer losses, and it doesn't exist, despite your best hopes.
Also - the way the money has been spent in some places is downright irresponsible. Why would a local politican take one-year money and hire new people? It's unsustainable. And if a few teachers do get laid off, it's not the end of the world. Education is important, yes, but increasing my kids class size from 20 to 30 isn't going to kill him, even assuming it is the teachers that feel the squeeze. (OMG won't someone please think about the childrenz!)
Maybe people have found out about the fictional jobs "created or saved" in fictional congressional districts.
Maybe people heard about the money used to give RAISES, and one of Obama's many total idiot advisors explaining that the raise "saved jobs" because, otherwise people might have quit that job.
Maybe people heard about the language requiring public projects to use only union labor - creating a few very high paying jobs vs more jobs at somewhat lower wages - with lots more productivity.
Maybe people have come to think of the Obama/Pelosi.Reid porkulus program as total bulls-it.
Personally, I'm thrilled that porkulus may have some some teacher jobs in my own school district on Long Island - a district where the AVERAGE teacher salary is only $96,000 and the teachers are at war with the district to get an additional 4.5% raise ON TOP of the yearly increase they get just for showing up. It's important that they get this raise so, that when they retire at age 62, their 70% retirement can be even higher. It thrills me that Obama spent his money we don't have to help "save" the noble, dedicated, union teachers who are not really greedy, lazy union scum.
Correction: "when they retire at age 62" should have said "when they retire at age 52".
When a pollster says "create jobs" many people will translate as "create private sector jobs." In the minds of many, a stimulus that primarily creates or saves public sector jobs doesn't count as "creating jobs." If you strip out government and quasi-government (contractors) jobs created by the stimulus, the belief becomes a lot less silly. Probably still wrong, but not ludicrous or insane.
I too have been concerned about the future of The Atlantic.
With writers like Derek, I often have to check that I am not reading the Onion.
Angst,
Thanks for pointing out what I have been thinking over the past year and a half.
For years I have loved opening up the Atlantic to read well written articles void of the author's political spin. Don't get me wrong, I do understand that everyone has some political point of view, and that view will appear in what is written.
However, the reason that I subscribed to the Atlantic was because many of their journalists seemed to be able to write above that fray. Over the past year, the amount of partisan writing generated by journalists working for the Atlantic has soured me on reading most articles published.
Over the past 4 years I would bring in my copy of the Atlantic and place it in a location for my staff to read the articles that related to our day to day work. Everyone would read it, but over the past year, each new copy of the magazine sat unread. (I have a staff of 10 and the turnover has been 0% in 4 years.) When I asked why during a recent meeting, they explained to me that they are tired of reading articles written by people with an agenda, both left and right.
I feel that the Atlantic's business model has moved towards one of trying to increase "web hits" in order to increase revenue. I understand that by commenting on this latest blog by Thompson I am furthering that school of thought. But I felt it time to let the Atlantic know, that enough is enough.
What I can do, and say with conviction is that this will be the last time that I read anything posted by Thompson, or 90% of the journalists that the Atlantic allows to use this website.
I will not be renewing my subscription to the Atlantic, which is sad. If I had wanted to read nothing but politically motivated blogs and articles, there are other places that I can go. I wish the Atlantic had stuck with what motivated me to subscribe in the first place; well written articles that allowed me to use my mind to understand what was trying to be conveyed.
And for those who may think that I adhere to some political point of view, you are wrong. I am an independent, and I dislike both parties. I would rather use my mind to decide how to vote instead of relying on some dogmatic point of view.
Hi Chris,
I'm am sincerely sorry to hear that you will cancel your subscription to the magazine, which I think everybody on the Atlantic team considers a separate product from the website. While we bloggers do our best to hold fast to the principles that guide the print version of our title -- independent and forward thinking, the relentless pursuit of truth through the clutter -- it is true that the atmosphere of the web is more receptive to something closer to a freestyle than a sitting orchestra. In the magazine, articles are deeply thought, drafted, edited, re-edited and scrutinized. On a blog, for better or worse, you write as you think.
So that's what I do. I read, I react, I think, I write. Sometimes, in retrospect, my thoughts are klutzy. Occasionally they are defensible. In this instance, looking back at my work, there is certainly a coarseness to my approach which might have been objectionable, and I apologize if it was the tone that threw you off. But I do stand by the substance, thin as you might find it. It is simply not defensible in my mind to to think that slashing state relief would create jobs. The structure of state budgets, combined with the politics of tax increases, is such that state deficits are not permitted by law and uniformly result in education cuts. When the economy recovers, state tax revenue recovers and those jobs are re-insulated. Education is an investment in future innovation and productivity. I don't see how it could possibly be desirable to see those jobs disappear for years.
That said, you and others can object. And should! And I hope you do, even to this note. That is, after all, the very purpose of a magazine and a blog and a comments section. We're all thinking out loud here, and I hope you aren't turned off by the creaking sound of the mental gears. Thanks again, as always, for reading.
-D
Don't worry... Rasmussen explained their "likely voter" model the other day, and basically if you're not old and rich, they don't really count you in their numbers when polling. A likely voter to them is one who was old enough to vote for Nixon.
As for the bizzarro economics being professed in the comments, well, maybe one of the commenters can explain how one can have a growing economy without a money supply, which is what they are advocating.
How exactly does govenment spending increase the money supply?
In this country the money supply increases when banks lend money, as a side effect of fractional reserve banking.
http://www.csun.edu/bus302/Lab/ReviewMaterial/macro6.pdf
Government spending only increases the money supply if the debt is monetized, which starts a process that can end in hyper inflation.
Do you know for a fact that the Fed is doing this? Because they deny it vociferously. Furthermore, your comment implies that you think this is a great idea. Do you?
I read the Atlantic to gain understanding about current news from writers that have a brain in their heads, not a thumb up their enlightened a--.
Atlantic editors, I regret clicking on this article to give it my "view", but I am glad that people care enough to post intelligent comments. Please send Thompson to CNN, his paycheck to jbraunstein, and return to providing substance with quality reporting or you will lose another subscriber.
MODIFY poorly conceived Stimulus:
1) Pelosi / Democrats require 85% of the Stimulus jobs go to Union workers at $45 an hour vs. National average of $25 an hour or 300,000 lost jobs and 300,000 on unemployment (Union kickback for votes)
- Drop the Union Requirement
2) Pelosi / Democrats: striped the E-Verify provision = 300,000 ILLEGALS can get construction jobs, typically through subcontracts
- E-Verify ... taxpayer money - American Jobs
3) Even Obama mentioned actually going to practical "real world" economic methodologies as proposed by Larry Summers (Willy Clinton and Obama Cabinet member - made Willy look good)
- Lower payroll tax ... companies can afford employees
- Lower Corporate tax .. US is second highest behind Japan (grow companies - Summers)
- Accelerate Depreciation ... new computers, plant and equipment - high tech world these days
So China and India are kicking our butt and Obama / Pelosi kickback money to Illegals and Unions, so we'll be ready to compete coming out of the recession ... genius.
Partisan kickback stimulus is worthless like the Cash for clunkers
- all reports now state the Cash for Clunkers was a short term gain and for every $4,000 rebate it cost the taxpayers $24,000 (Government run - and they want to run Health Care)and most people traded in low mpg trucks for new low mpg trucks .. no "Climate Change" improvement
.
Derek, With all due respect, I think you are the one that really needs to rethink your position, because in my mind the average american is smarter than what we give them credit for. Sure, they lack the higher education such as those of most of The Atlantic's writers, but they have an intuitive feel that they operate from, a feel that is crushed in academics by our current "higher education" environment. I can speak from experience, as a liberal college professor the last 30 years, I've pretty much lost my respect for The Atlantic at being so out of touch with what's really happening in the economic world today. What the american people see is that we as a nation are essentially bankrupt, and they know from looking at their own personal pocket book that more borrowing is not going to fix the problem. They also hear about future government liabilities in the form of social security and medicare, and to them the numbers don't add up. They are right. The stimulus today simply kicks the can down the road, it doesn't solve anything. Where the jobs will be lost is from the interest on that debt that they'll have to pay, or if the fed monitizes the debt, in the form of higher inflation that will eat away their standard of living. I very strongly encourage you to take a very hard look at the total debt, public, private and corporate and the future predictions by the OMB on where all this is headed. It is very sobering that will require a massive restructuring of our economy, not trying to gloss it over with future obligations in the form of a short-term stimulus. The stimulus is nothing more than another injection of morphine into the addict that waits for the medical community to come up with a pill that cures his disease.
I actually applaud Derek for his candor. This is idiotic, from Paul Krugman to Bruce Bartlet you have widespread agreement that the Stimulus bill was necessary (now could it have been larger, or structured differently, etc). But the simple truth is the public's economic vocabulary is extremely limited.
Understanding the difference between macroeconomic principles and microeconomic is not easy. Your personal finances are nothing like what a government has to deal with. That is simply a fact. Will the stimulus have some sort of deleterious effect later? That is possible, but inaction was by far the more dangerous worry. If we were staring at soup lines and 15-17% unemployment, I guarantee "people" would be screaming that the government wasn't doing enough.
But I think Derek's point remains, people do not understand what the actual mechanisms involved are (personal virtue paradox invoked here). Tax rates are at their lowest point since, well I am not sure. Cutting revenue and spending, during the worst recession since the Great Depression is foolish. I am not an economic policy purist. I think both Keynes and Friedman have a place at the table. Some situations require one, and some require the other. Complex systems and all that....
RomanX, What the average american deals with is the same as the government, in its simplest form. The government can't borrow more than its income indefinately, regardless of the issues it deals with. The biggest problem we have today is that government has become so intertwined with the economy, that we think it has to become more intertwined to save it. The government is not omniscient, and like all governments that end up with such large social obligations and heavy debt load, it is heading in only one direction. That fact alone is all the american people need to see, and its slowly rising to their consciousness. What is happening today is not what Keynes argued for. He argued that during booms the government should generate a surplus and pay off its debts accumulated during downturns. There is no fiscal incentive for any individual politician to do that, so they don't. Even when Republicans controlled everything they didn't show fiscal restraint. No politician gets re-elected based on whether they implement true Keynsian economics. The best hope is for government to work with the wealthy to build manufacturing plants back home and to promote development of alternative sources of energy to create jobs and correct the trade imbalance. I don't see a Marshall Plan from government yet for that. That is the only way government can truly help. The so called increase in GDP is nothing more than an increase in government involvement in the economy. At $1.4 trillion in new debt per year, it is simply unsustainable. The guy swilling his beer at the local bar can put that much together.
RomanX, One other point I missed. Paul Krugman himself said the economics community needs to go through some serious soul searching to try to figure out how they missed the recent financial meltdown. There ARE people who saw it coming, but they were and for the most part are still being ignored. In my time in academia, I can tell you that even people that win nobel prizes are not necessarily geniuses. Those same people that missed the crisis are telling you we need more stimulus. If they missed predicting the crisis, then why should we have confidence they know what they're doing now? If they came out with sound reasoning as to HOW they missed it, and how now their formula for helping it will work, I might listen. But they haven't done that.
Deeper,
That is true, and I agree whole heartedly with you in that respect. However, there are individuals who did foresee these events coming and are still calling for another stimulus. There are also others that pointed out that the stimulus was too small and pointed that out as well. It would be nice if those who were fantastically wrong (Jim Cramer still has a career after all, and most of the heads of the major banks still have jobs) had to pay some sort of price for that, but consequences are only for the proletariats.
The problem, at least in my estimation, is always one of process over substance. We rarely argue policy over its merits, but instead argue "will it pass". We talk about "do we have the votes?", but rarely "will this work?". The health care debate is a great example of that.
We seem to be saddled with pundits talking about things that are outside their purview. I would much rather have listened to Krugman, DeLong, Roubini, Crook, Bartlett, etc, talk about the economic predicament then Pelosi, Pence, Palin, Rove or Dean.
Derek,
While I agree that most Americans -- indeed, most people -- don't think rationally about economics (or anything else!), I think the poll is perfectly explicable.
The Obama administration told us that unemployment would skyrocket without the stimulus.
The stimulus passed.
Unemployment skyrocketed.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc: The increase in unemployment must be due to the stimulus.
The alternative explanation is that the Obama administration is full of incompetent, ignorant, mendacious fools.
So the poll results actually demonstrate a fundamental charity in the American mindset often missing from our politics.
How odd, I read this:
Nov 20 2009, 10:40AM
Obama Flubbed His 1st Stimulus. Can He Pass a 2nd?
by Derek Thompson
then 2 hours later you wonder why people think that essentially canceling the stimulus would be a good thing (i.e. create jobs). Is it really that hard to believe that people would come to the conclusion: 1st stimulus = fail/bad; eliminate stimulus = good
Kinda answered your own question is seems.
Derek, I think the commenters here pretty much proved your point.
Rasmussen is a republican-leaning pollster.
I'm on the Keynesian side here, by which I mean the story makes sense to me, but I can see how people might think that the stimulus is killing jobs. Because unemployment is in fact going up.
The stimulus was oversold.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/11/unemployment-update.html
I've always hated the stimulus packages, but yes, those 51 percent are really dumb.
The problem isn't that these people are misunderstanding the problem. It's not like they're dissecting it or anything. The problem is that so many people compartmentalize things only by 'good' or 'bad'. They associate stimulus packages with 'bad' (because it's the government being proactive), and they associate jobs with 'good', so therefore, the stimulus packages must be responsible for taking jobs away. That's it. That's the entirety of the calculation that most of those 51% are doing.
They can't be bothered with the oh-so-complicated argument that maybe, somehow, the stimulus package is *creating* jobs and yet still, in the big picture, a negative influence on the future of the country. That would be a reasonable perspective, but one most people can't be bothered to possess.
Thanks for the mostly civil discussion. What I feel is going on with the "ignorant" is a very complex dynamic that can be summed up by a deep seated lack of "trust." Who is the average person to believe? After all we are talking about 1. the dismal science of economics which has several Nobel Prize winners in complete disagreement and 2. the government of the United States which can not even turn out 30% of voting age adults and 3. the "media" that is, well the "media." As someone who started reading the Atlantic at the age of 16, in 1962, by researching the archives at the library to read Emerson and Thoreau I can assure you that the WEB Atlantic is just riding on the old reputation of thoughtful and intelligent writing that still does exist from time to time in the magazine. That does not make Derek's contribution worthless but it does leave me wondering if there is any hope that the "blogosphere" has any function other than to keep us from watching television. And yes, the stimulus was oversold as is everything these days. Cheers.
Idiocracy? Stupid? This has got to be one of the most condescending things I've read on The Atlantic in ages. I suppose someone else probably wrote the Headline on the business page, but come on Derek - one poll that gave a result you didn't like is hardly reason to go casting aspersions on the country's intellect.
Believe it or not, a lot of citizens in this country don't have the time to follow things in detail the way Atlantic bloggers might. Maybe they thought the stimulus money would get spent elsewhere if it was cancelled?
Heck - maybe there is job creation out there being delayed as groups jockey for the slowly-paid-out stimulus money? Maybe they might have been paid for with private money otherwise (eg, Kraft's Foxboro footbridge).