Thursday, January 15, 2009

Why An Economic Stimulus is Bad

It seems like all I am writing about now is the economy. However, I believe that the economy, and our response to it, can greatly determine where our country goes. I also feel like President Bush, President Elect Obama, and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the Senate are making poor choices with our money.


Glenn Beck had a great analogy on his show today. Any errors I make in retelling it are purely my own. I am going to paraphrase his argument. Glenn Beck points out what our leaders in Washington are saying: they don't know how to fix the economy, they aren't sure about the stimulus pacakage, but we have to do something. Mr. Beck says to imagine that our economy is a patient at a hospital. The patient is very sick, and the doctor isn't sure exactly what is going wrong. In order to save the patient, the doctor feels he has to do something. He starts using different experimental treatments much like the different stimulus packages are experimental ways to fix our economy. The more drugs the doctor tries, the more sick the patient becomes. Finally the doctor comes to the family and says, "We have to do something, so we are going to give him the biggest dose of the same experimental drug we have been using and we'll see what happens." What do you think the family would say?


Our economy is like that. As I noted in a recent post, CNN says we have allocated $7.2 trillion in economic stimulus packages. So far, our economy has continued into a recession. The patient hasn't shown signs of improvements. We shouldn't try the same drugs. We need a different solution.


The answer is to make our country the most competitive country in the nation for business. We need to lower our corporate tax rates to the lowest in the developed world, and maybe lower them some more. We need to cut taxes on investors and encourage them to invest and create jobs. We need to structure our economy so that any business that wants to survive the storm comes to our shores.

3 comments:

Kevin said...

Andy,
There is a huge difference here. Barack Obama has not infused the money into the economy. 1 trillion of his dollars is easily worth like a jillion of President Bush's dollars.

As a side note do you not find it ironic that Congress passed a bill for $700 billion that had no real guidelines as to how to use it, and they knew it at the time, but passed it quickly because something had to be done and now they are complaining that it was not used according to the way they wanted it to which was not written down in the law...

Andy D said...

I wish I could say I thought it was Ironic. However, the more I see of this Congress, the more I think it is just par for the course.

Kevin said...

well there is HOPE that with the coronation of King Obama today he might hold them responsible for something...wow I almost said that with out laughing.