And The Reason For The Porkulus Bill Was What?

And The Reason For The Porkulus Bill Was What?

Over at Maggie's Farm I found this link to the Congressional Budget Office's predictions of January 8, 2009 assuming "that current laws and policies regarding federal spending and taxation remain the same..."

CBO anticipates that the current recession, which started in December 2007, will last until the second half of 2009, making it the longest recession since World War II. (The longest such recessions otherwise, the 1973–1974 and 1981–1982 recessions, both lasted 16 months. If the current recession were to continue beyond midyear, it would last at least 19 months.) It could also be the deepest recession during the postwar period: By CBO’s estimates, economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 percent below its potential—that is, the level of output that would be produced if the economy’s resources were fully employed (see Figure 1).

So by the time the vast majority of the pork has been spent--the recession will already be over. Which means that the stimulus package according to even the Congressional Budget Office won't accomplish anything. And according to this January 23, 2009 New York Times table of previous recessions and stimulus packages passed by Congress in the post-World War II period, it is rare for a package that "fixes" the economy to get passed before the recession ends.



This is not surprising; the natural boom and bust cycle of a free market economy means that the busts usually come to an end after 1 1/2 years (unless Congress does something really stupid, like Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act)--and it takes almost that long for Congress to stop whoring and boozing long enough to figure out to do something useless.

In short, Obama and the Democrats know that the sun is going to rise shortly--they want to get that chicken sacrificed now so that they can claim that they caused the sun to rise. I can see bits and pieces of good news in the number of local software engineering jobs being advertised (even though none of them seem to fit me).

I'm glad that I didn't fiddle with my investments; three years from now, the stock market will probably have gotten back to where it was at start of 2008, and I will be only infuriated at the amount of debt that the Democrats (and three uselessly stupid Republicans) signed us up for to make the sun rise.