About The Stimulus Plan

I heard a bit last night about Rush Limbaugh challenging the President on his stimulus plan. What I hear is that Rush thinks the President is scared of him. Yeah, right. On one hand, we have a fat oaf who has not changed his scare tactics in thirty years. On the other hand, we have Obama. Let's face one fact about Obama: whenever we ever see whatever makes Obama scared we know we got a reason to be scared. Son of an African immigrant runs for President of the United States....this guy has no fear. Guy takes over from George W. Bush, and we better realize nothing daunts him. Limbaugh's drug use is showing. Or maybe it is a more natural megalomania.

Not that the stimulus plan does not have its problems for me. I am not sure if the House and Senate Democrats do not need to check out the definition of infrastructure. On the other hand, the Republicans say they are getting no input with a straight face - just like they claimed there were WMD and they were the party of fiscal responsibility. If anything the President and the Democrats have been more conciliatory towards the Republicans than the Republicans were ever to the Democrats during the last Administration.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman blows apart the nonsense in his Bad Faith Economics:

"First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years."

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Finally, ignore anyone who tries to make something of the fact that the new administration’s chief economic adviser has in the past favored monetary policy over fiscal policy as a response to recessions.

It’s true that the normal response to recessions is interest-rate cuts from the Fed, not government spending. And that might be the best option right now, if it were available. But it isn’t, because we’re in a situation not seen since the 1930s: the interest rates the Fed controls are already effectively at zero.