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Posts Tagged ‘obama stimulus package’

Another Obama Stimulus Spending Bill Looms On the Horizon

July 4th, 2009 Comments off

Only a few weeks ago, the cheerleaders from the financial community and Obama administration were preaching the gospel of “green shoots,” those supposedly subtle indicators that the U.S. recession was bottoming out , and a recovery was just around the corner. However, amid a flood of dire economic and financial news, not the least being the bad unemployment numbers for June, there is increasing talk in Washington that a second dose of deficit-driven stimulus spending  will be required from Washington if the nation’s severe economic contraction is to be reversed.

Not surprisingly, the Republicans are already labelling President Obama’s economic recovery spending package a failure. They point out that Barack Obama’s economic team had envisioned the unemployment rate stabilizing at 8% during 2009, as the impact of nearly $800 billion in borrowed money being unleashed by the Federal government would arrest the free fall in employment numbers. The June statistics released by the Labor department reveal that nearly half a million Americans lost their jobs in June, a significantly higher number than was posted in the previous month, taking the official U3 unemployment rate to 9.5%. However, the disastrous economic performance of the George W. Bush administration, aided and abetted by a  Congress under Republican domination for most of the previous president’s term of office, undercuts the credibility of the GOP’s criticism of the Obama administration on economic policy. Of far greater significance is that much of the criticism is now coming from the left-of-center of the Democratic Party.

Many neo-Keynesian economists  were critical of the original Obama stimulus package for allegedly being too small. Their position was that the  contraction brought on by the Global Economic Crisis required governments across the world, but especially in the United States, to borrow massively in order to compensate for the diminution in private sector economic activity. In a recent op-ed piece in The New York Time, economist Paul Krugman represented this point of view forcefully in labelling the current stimulus package as being  totally inadequate, and emphasizing that a second stimulus spending bill of sizeable dimensions was essential if the U.S. was to avoid slipping into an even worse economic crisis. He drew parallels with the economic downturn that occurred in 1937, when the Roosevelt administration pulled back from New Deal pump-priming in order to bring the Federal budget back under control.

While the Obama administration has been hesitant thus far in committing to a second stimulus spending bill, the combination of growing calls for more deficit spending combined with political realities, namely the 2010 mid-term elections, will likely create accelerating momentum towards another so-called “economic recovery act.” No Democrat wants to run in 2010 with unemployment continuing to rise.

Putting aside political factors, is a second stimulus spending bill a wise course to follow? In my view the answer is no. Just as I disagreed with the wisdom of both the original $800 billion spending bill and the $700 billion TARP Wall Street bailout package of last fall, I fail to see how the at best short-term enhancement of certain economic indicators outweighs the massive liability of further damaging the already frail fiscal health of the country. The neo-Keynesian economists fail to understand that the United States no longer has the luxury of engaging in counter-cyclical economic policy when its bank balance is mired in red ink. The global bond market is already providing early warning signs that  profligate borrowing needs on the part of the U.S. government are simply unsustainable in the long-run. Not only would another stimulus spending orgy  probably not improve the nation’s long-term economic health; the further deterioration in the fiscal viability of the U.S. government will inevitably create its own negative feedback loop, further exacerbating the underlying weaknesses in the American economy.

The fiscal catastrophe  underway in America’s largest state, California, should serve as a brightly-lit red warning lamp for the entire nation. Endless debt by the sovereign does not guarantee long-term economic equilibrium. It is a roadmap to financial and economic Armageddon.

 

For More Information on “Global Economic Forecast 2010-2015” please go to the homepage of our website, http://www.globaleconomiccrisis.com 

 

 

U.S. Budget Deficit Will Likely Exceed 2 Trillion Dollars

January 15th, 2009 Comments off
The U.S. congressional budget office has recently forecast that the current federal budget deficit will exceed $ 1.2 trillion dollars, more than double the previous year’s near-record government overdraft. However, the CBO estimate does not even include the Obama stimulus package in its estimates, likely to be in the range of a trillion dollars over two years. Perhaps most problematic, the estimates conveniently set aside the catastrophic diminution in tax receipts that are inevitable, as the impact of the Global Economic Crisis on the American economy contracts payrolls and bankrupts businesses large and small. Just as dead men tell no tales, dead companies and unemployed workers pay no taxes.
WWW.GlobalEconomicCrisis.com projects that for 2009, the U.S. government will have a deficit in excess of two trillion dollars and possibly even in excess of $2.5 trillion. However, government taxing and spending does not only occur at the federal level. All over America during the course of 2009, state, municipal and county governments will be drowning in red ink, and beg the federal government to bail them out. That is the logic of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. There is a limit to how much money even the United States Treasury can borrow. However, an even greater danger lurks in both the short and long term.
The massive deficit spending that Washington initiated as the global financial and economic crisis accelerated was supposed to free up the credit markets and allow normal flows of business lending to proceed. In a fiscal paradox, the very solution implemented by the U.S. Treasury and Congress, massive debt spending by government, will inevitably suck up credit from the private sector like a vacuum cleaner, diverting this economic necessity into the public deficit purse, further aggravating the credit crunch.
The out-of-control multi-trillion dollar deficits being offered by Washington politicians and their coteries of corporate socialists desperate for a government bailout will bankrupt both the public and private sector, and ensure that the Global Economic Crisis brings about a worldwide depression of catastrophic proportions.