The Cato Institute is running full-page ads in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Roll Call this week disputing the claim from President Obama that their is a consensus about the stimulus package. As Mr. Obama puts it:
There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.
We at CEI disagree and, as it turns out, we’re not alone. Cato’s ad includes the names of 200 economists who oppose the “stimulus” package. Among them are towering intellects like James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986 for his work on how politicians’ self-interest and non-economic forces affect government economic policy. How appropriate.
In the ad, Cato’s club of 200 economists respond to Mr. Obama claim in big, bold-face letter, declaring:
With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.
They continue by saying:
Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.
Here’s a PDF copy of the ad. If you agree that government action won’t help us out of our economic mess and may even make matters worse, be sure to foward the ad to friends via email, share it on Facebook, tweet about it on Twitter, and otherwise spread the word.
You can read more about the opposition to the stimulus by visting Cato’s site at http://www.cato.org/fiscalreality or by reading CEI’s Agenda for Congress at http://cei.org/congress.
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Ok…
This sounds like a sound-bite response and broken record of the past 8 years.
“To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”
Yeah great, but the problems we are facing are much bigger than what is being laid out here. Everything is broken right now.
I am not suggesting Obama’s advisers are giving the right advice either.
What is the definition of our economy today? The Internet has changed everything.
Our economic system is broken. Industries are breaking. We probably need to radically restructure the economy, taxes, the idiotic legal gambling system we call the banking industry.
We need bigger change than lower taxes and less Government. We need to look at everything and possibly radically change our whole economic system. To what? I don’t know. But, something bigger than what they are suggesting is happening here.
I like Iofasz’s bumper sticker resoponse about the “last eight years”, too bad in his recollection ABOUT the last eight years it didn’t include the highest Dow Jones, the lowest unemployment rate, the growth in the economy and personal saving and investment. I’m not an economist, but I’ve done some surfing on The Heritage Foundation and on Google, and these FACTS are easily found and, I’m sure with a liberal opinion where Bush has done nothing right and all that’s wrong with the world is America’s fault because George W. Bush breathes, it would be difficult to acknowledge the the Bush tax cuts actually worked….sorry, they have, and have been very beneficial to the American economy for EVERYBODY, and not just the “evil” rich, just so ya know.
It is not a surprise that there is no consensus for the stimulus package. You can disagree but at the same time we have to realize that Obama won with wide margin and he has political capital that he can spend to pass the stimulus package. At this point, I think we should give the President chance and judge the outcomes from this package.
Mandatory redistribution. Take an extra trillion from the working Americans who don’t pile up debt, don’t get mortgages that are beyond their means (that the government encouraged), and who take responsibility for their own actions. Now, give that money to those who are on the other side of the fence, instead of encouraging accountbility and consequences for poor decisions. What will be the result? It will be the same as a junkie who is trying to quit, but who keeps shooting up “just to hold off the pain.”