Watching the first few episodes of this season’s “Lost,” the feeling crept over me again – that eerie, woozy, uncanny sense of becoming unstuck in time, untethered to logic, swarmed by sinister portents in a reality that was growing smudged and dire. The last time I’d felt that way I was reading about another item of scary science fiction – Barack Obama’s “economic stimulus.”
“What you see in FDR, that I hope my team can emulate, is not always getting it right, but projecting a sense of confidence, and a willingness to try things. And experiment in order to get people working again.” – Barack Obama
“Why in God’s name would I ever want to go back there?” – Desmond
The characters on “Lost” get zapped around in time. “Did any of them happen to mention what year it is?” asked Daniel last week. Barack Obama’s answer to that one is obvious: It’s 1933. It’s one thing to admit human imperfection. But it takes a very special, “Lost” kind of logic to say that your “hope” is “not always getting it right,” but to pretend you’re not blundering and act with “confidence” anyway.
“It was a great relief, after decades of knee-jerk denunciations of government, to hear a new president giving a shout-out to Keynes.” – Paul Krugman
“My name is John Locke.” – Locke
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” – Richard
“Lost” tosses around the names of dead European philosophers like John Locke and Jeremy Bentham without ever quite seeming to know what they mean, the way Obama’s apologists keep citing John Maynard Keynes. Keynes pioneered the idea that, when you’re in an economic hole, you should break out your deficit shovel and keep digging. But Keynes also said, “It is a mistake to think that businessmen are more immoral than politicians.” Obama would be wise to simply cut corporate taxes (the second-highest in the world after Japan’s), which would encourage job creation. Then he could cut consumer taxes to boost spending. His bill would be one page instead of 647. But Obama’s fantasists are like “Lost” writers who love conjuring up a thrilling new alternate universe of infinite possibility, leaving it to the next-generation writing staff to make sense of all the loose ends. Obama’s plan would not just break but double the previous deficit record as a percentage of GDP.
“Every economist, as I’ve said, from conservative to liberal, acknowledges that direct government spending on a direct program now is the best way to infuse economic growth and create jobs.” -Joe Biden
“Dude, they’ll find out.” – Hurley
“Not if we stick to the story.” – Jack
Biden’s statement suggests a surreal lack of acquaintance with reality. If he’d spent 10 minutes looking for stimulus skeptics, he would have found such prominent economists as Robert Barro, Gary Becker, John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Robert Lucas, Greg Mankiw, etc. The “stimulus” comes billed as a packet of magic beans that will grow our economy to the heavens. I’ve spent the last three months dithering over which $600 video camera to buy. It turns out there are a lot of factors to consider: ease of use, editing software, flash memory vs. hard drive . . . Congress is about to spend hundreds of billions that they threw together in a couple of weeks? This bill costs more than the entire Iraq War. (Does anyone wish less planning went into that?)
“Note that only 8% of this spending occurs in budget year 2009, and only 41% occurs in [the] first two years.” – Harvard economist Greg Mankiw
“I don’t understand how any of this works any more than you do.” – Desmond
Where is the stimulus in borrowing a trillion bucks from future generations to write checks to, for instance, depressed Brooklyn poets ($50 million goes to the National Endowment for the Arts), the folks who run the USSR of transportation at Amtrak ($1 billion, although that payoff should at least subsidize growth in the standup comedy industry) and the poor, who are getting $650 million to buy new digital TV tuners? Yep, the one thing poor people need is encouragement to watch more TV. If you think this is an infrastructure bill, guess again: Less than 5% goes to highway projects.
You wouldn’t expect the US economy to enter a prolonged period of distress and disease, but Japan once thought it had the strongest economy in the world too. Now where is Japan? Has anyone seen it? As Hurley puts it on “Lost,” “I mean, the island disappeared. We all saw it. It’s gone. Bloop!”