This article from the Washington Post, has Vice-President Biden answering critics of President Obama's economic plan, especially the effectiveness of the stimulus package in creating jobs.
Biden tells people that all one needs to do is to look around and see people working. To him, that's evidence that the stimulus package was helpful and necessary.
Is the vice president suggesting that when you look around and see people at work that those people owe their jobs to Obama and the stimulus package? That's what it sounds like. How does he prove this? Did no one have any jobs before the stimulus package?
And how about one of Biden's economic advisers saying, "The point of these programs on the jobs front is to cushion the blow."
So how exactly do we measure the extent of this "cushion"?
So how generally do we measure the extent of this "cushion"?
Is it even possible to measure the extent of this "cushion"?
All Biden and Obama have to do is say, "You think things are tough now, but--if it hadn't been for our ecnomic policies--things would be much worse."
Such a statement is impossible to verify or disprove. It's called a cop-out.
This is the essence of why economics is refered to as the dismay science. They are no laboratory experiments, only natural ones. There is no macroeconomic certainty; there are too many variables. However, I will call this Keynesian spade a spade...Krugman, Obama and Biden are all full of crap.
ReplyDelete"If our stilmulus didn't work, then it just wasn't big enough. It couldn't be that paying people to produce undesired products is a bad idea in concept and in practice that only serves to waste our limited resources. Could it? Naw!"