Massive New Govt Spending Harms Economy

They can pretend to call a Trillion dollar boondoggle a 'stimulus' but that doesnt make it so, anymore than calling chicken-fried steak 'a low-calorie diet'. Government spending does not stimulate growth. As WSJ on why stimulus plans fail explains, it just shifts the spending from one pocket to another:

"... the government can spend $1 billion hiring road builders and purchasing asphalt, it must first tax or borrow $1 billion from other sectors of the economy, which then lose a similar number of jobs.

In other words, highway spending merely transfers jobs and income from one part of the economy to another. As economist Ronald Utt has explained, "The only way that $1 billion of new highway spending can create 47,576 new jobs is if the $1 billion appears out of nowhere as if it were manna from heaven.""

This list of Heritage Stimulus Dos and Donts, has a list of "Donts" that sounds sadly like the proposed Democrat bill. Here's what NOT to do - Stimulus Ideas That Would Make the Economy Worse:

• Spend public money in hopes of driving growth.
• Use rebates to "inject" money into the economy in an effort to increase demand.
• Try to create jobs with frivolous transportation spending.
• Implement non-stimulative tax cuts.
• Bail out states that mismanaged their own finances.
• Fail to learn from the experience of other nations.

If we review the floated plan: It 'tax cuts' that are almost all 'non-stimulative' tax cuts that help special interest cases but don't lower rates on economic production; the rest - amounting to an enormous hundreds of billions of dollars - is the unhelpful boondoggle of Government spending for the sake of spending 'stimulus'. It will not stimulate - it will SOCIALIZE the economy. This is economic stupidity of the highest order and would send the nation into terrible debt with zero benefit to the economy.

David Limbaugh cites a chilling quote from the FDR era, cited by Burton W. Folsom Jr. in "New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America." The quote is from FDR's Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.:

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And an enormous debt to boot."

IBD: Paving projects won't boost economy: "It should not be forgotten that it is Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, the WPA, to which we owe the word "boondoggle." " Do we want that to Obama's legacy as well? Boondoggles, an enormous debt, and an economy that sputters along? That will be the legacy if this mistaken policy is enacted.