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1. Comment by Carl Clegg on 12 February 2009:

   It’s a disservice to continue to continue to call it a “stimulus” bill. It’s really the largest spending bill in the history of…well, mankind. All of this mad spending rachets up the baseline for future budgets. And much of the spending on entitlement programs will never go away after 2-3 years — they will all get much much bigger: Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, Pell Grants, even farm subsidies, food stamps and nutrition programs for obese kids and seniors.But the biggest worry for Obama and the rest of the nation should be: What if all this spending fails to stimulate? Then what? We’re already looking at a deficit of $1.2 trillion…and that’s before we add all this new stimulus spending into the mix. Half of Americans say that the stimulus will not affect their situation and might even make it worse. Can all these folks be wrong? And all we’re getting from Obama is that it doesn’t matter whether government is small or large, it only matters what works. Hello, when did ratcheting up government spending ever stiumlate the economy. The street responded to Geithner’s vague banking plan sans details by driving the Dow down nearly 5%. What does that tell us about the street’s confidence in our Treasury Secretary? Obama is telling us that it’s not about idealogy…but about what works, but on his recent visit to Indiana he explained how the weatherization of homes is an example of the multiplier effect. The “multiplier effect” is a misguided Keynsian principle that says for each dollar spent, the economy sees $2 in benefit. If that were really the case, why not spend $10 trillion and every American could be a millionaire. The Keynsian fallacy is that government spending can create wealth and thus government spending is necessary to repair an ailing economy. The kicker is that with all this spending Obama is going to create or save 4 million jobs. How do you count “saved jobs”. If everyone who is not laid off between now and the end of the recession is counted as a “saved job”, perhaps Obama could up his count.

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