Extremist myths...
Oct 18, 2012 | 482 views | 0 0 comments | 7 7 recommendations | email to a friend | print
If you listen to the right-wingers, the president’s $800 billion dollar stimulus was a failure, government cannot create jobs, and money is more productive in the hands of the wealthy than the middle and lower classes. These assertions were made last month by Greg Stucki, writing in a different local periodical.

  As for his supposed “failure” of the stimulus: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the stimulus “lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points” and “increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.”

  Seems to me that’s a lot of people on the job, buying their kids food and able to pay their mortgage.

  The far right even asserts that the stimulus failed because the nation’s unemployment isn’t lower – currently 7.8 percent, down from 10.1 percent in 2009.

  Not as good as hoped, true... but a failure? Might as well say a batter fails when he hits a single or double rather than a home run.

  These people have an odd concept of failure. Especially since it was their “conservative” economics that disastrously failed America. Claiming the stimulus a failure is flat-out untrue.

  I’m sure glad to learn government can’t create jobs. Shouldn’t we spread the news? Heck, people need to know – particularly all those employees of National Parks, Forest Service, and BLM. And highway crews, teachers, librarians, and soldiers in Afghanistan. They’ll break out champagne when they find out the government hasn’t been employing them. Especially the soldiers – they’re likely tired of getting shot at while they work their nonexistent government job.

  Yet, I agree with him that money is best placed with elites. They need a larger share of the pie.

  Maybe not? Economists say monetary gains are higher when money is in the hands of middle-income and lower-income Americans, not concentrated in the upper class. Why? Because the money is quickly spent on food, clothing, and other necessities, thereby circulating and multiplying through businesses and supporting jobs.

The upper class spends a smaller percentage on necessities; monies are more likely to go into mutual funds investing in bonds or overseas emerging markets. Proportionally, their money circulates less within our economy.

  These people’s flawed Herbert Hoover-style economics brought America to the brink of another Great Depression. Their economics enrich elites at everyone else’s expense. It’s time America assigned these nonsensical rightwing ideas to a coffin in the graveyard of disproved extremist myths.

—Scott Thiele

Moab 
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