Andrew Leonard: Second Stimulus Package on the Horizon?
For all the naysayers who are convinced that spending money now and increasing the budget deficit will cause negative repercussions down the road when “the bill comes due,” I say that you’re either:
- Someone who is still making a lot of money, is not being impacted much by the recession, and doesn’t want to pay higher taxes to pay for more federal spending because you’re in the bracket that would; OR,
- Not in the first group, but you listen to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, etc. religiously, and believe every bogus, alarmist thing they say to increase their ratings.
The reality is that the market got us into this mess, and isn’t going to get us out of it, so the federal government must spend to get people back to work, and to keep state governments from collapsing altogether. Once the economy improves, the deficit will be paid back down again (at least to the point it was when George W. left office…) Don’t believe me? Robert Reich explained this really well in his column on 10/1/2009:
“When I was a small boy my father told me that I and my kids and my grand-kids would be paying down the debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression and World War II…
My father was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about this. America paid down FDR’s debt in the 1950s, when Americans went back to work, when the economy was growing again, and when our incomes grew, too. We paid taxes, and in a few years that FDR debt had shrunk to almost nothing.”
Leonard and others do question HOW the money is being spent in some areas, but I’ll leave that to the experts.
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2009/10/06/time_for_a_second_stimulus/index.html