Cato on the “Stimulus”

by Will Wilkinson on February 9, 2009

Here are some of my Cato colleagues on the deficit spending bill:

I wouldn’t say, with Dan Mitchell, that the French economy is “in the toilet,” but he’s right on the larger point.

Manufacturing dissent!

Pithlord

Whatever you think of the stimulus, that video was total crap. Presumably the same video could be made for any cause for which you could find six men in suits to express their opinion dogmatically. There wasn't a single argument or even an entertaining anecdote.

wph

Republicans pushed a lot of Libertarians (of both the small l and Big L varieties) into the Democratic camp by the war in Iraq and their free-spending ways. How much bad legslation like the "Stimulus Bill" will it take to push them back to the Republicans? I suspect that many will be leaning Republican by 2010.

Joe Strummer

Look, this economy is bad shape. Unemployment must rise and housing prices must fall. The answer to this isn't to inflate the currency, and to take on another trillion $. "We need nothing" is not "everything is going to be ok if we do nothing." It is that the economy must be allowed to find a bottom, and by preventing it from finding a bottom, we're just prolonging the process while at the same time creating major inflationary and debt problems that mean we will be dealing with this for 10 to 15 years.

odograph

Having heard the whole thing now ... I think their argument is strangely unrooted in time or conditions. They make anti-spending and anti-deficit arguments that I like and would buy into ... maybe 95% of the time. That is not inconsistent with government being the lender or employer of last resort. We hope "last resort" is something well less than 5% of the time.

If they really believe "we don't need nuthin'" they were a bit shy about standing up and saying what that means, what bottom they see for employment under the natural fall, etc.