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Anecdotal comparisons against internet bubble wages are not applicable to the general population. You complain about cherry picked stats and then go on to do the same.

Your car example misses the fact that given the quality improvements, new cars are being kept for several years longer, and thus have much more value.
https://www.economy.com/dismal...

I could easily do the same with your rent example. I paid $500/mo back in '82 for a 2 bedroom apt. That very same apartment complex has them for $1500-2700 now, a 3-500% increase, compared to my 700% increase in wages over the same period. Anecdotal, and cherry picked.

Incidentally Moody's have worked out the fiscal headway various countries have here

https://www.economy.com/dismal...

The Economist wrote about it here

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

With current debt to GDP ratios the US is in the greenzone. Doubling debt to to GDP ratio would be bad though. It would put the US somewhere between Ireland and Portugal.

This will affect Treasury Bill ratings, and the amount of interest the US pays on its debt.

The worst case is a sovereign debt crisis where credit ratings fall, interest payments on debt increase, those interest payments add to the debt, so the debt rises and the cycle repeats until the country defaults.

Policies that add $32 trillion to the US's public debt risk heading down this path.

Put down the bong dude... https://www.economy.com/dismal...

http://www.cbo.gov/publication/21019

http://www.cbo.gov/publication/41147

http://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/End-of-Great-Recession.pdf

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/08/14/gm-proves-obama-saved-detroit-but-voters-hate-bailouts.html

Fuck where did those come from?

First off, I never said I thought you were a right winger. I said it sounds like you are listening to them. You are clearly a smart person and you clearly do think for yourself, but you keep repeating fairly easily refuted right-wing talking points such as the one here.

It is absolutely false to say that the velocity of money is uniform regardless of where you spend it. The simplest example is what happens if I put the $600 from my stimulus check under my mattress for a few years? Obviously that money has a very low velocity. On the other hand, if I take that same $600 and spend it on groceries, the money would have a higher velocity, and spending the money on locally produced goods and services would give it an even higher velocity.

If on the other hand you give the money to the rich, there is very little motivation for them to spend the money at all. What's another $600 when you already make half a million a year? An even better example of this was the TARP program, particularly the first half that was administered under Bush. We gave the banks 350 billion dollars with absolutely no strings attached, in an effort to free up the credit market. But instead of increasing lending, the banks mostly took the money and either hoarded it or they spent it to buy up other banks at a huge discount. Neither of these has a beneficial effect on the velocity of money. The latter is certainly spending, but at firesale prices, so I suspect that the investors are not terribly happy with the situation (I know that many Washington Mutual shareholders are furious about the way the WaMu/Chase merger was forced down their throats, and it was pretty devastating to the Seattle economy, where something like 8,000 people lost jobs and the downtown real estate market lost its single biggest customer).

You are right that there is no 'perfect' stimulus plan, but there are 'good' ones. For example one of the best parts of the original proposed stimulus plan was weatherzation of public schools and other buildings. Not only would this have the short-term effect of creating thousands of jobs across the country, but it would have two additional secondary benefits: it would have lowered the ongoing energy costs of operating these buildings (therefore lowering our taxes) and it would have lowered the nations long-term energy demands. This is an obvious win/win scenario, and should have been the focal point of the entire plan, but the Republicans shot that part of the stimulus plam down. Now only a small part of the stimulus goes to these programs.

The right-wing quite literally did everything in their power to sabotage the plan that we ended up by putting their own long-term political good in front of that of the nation. They know that all that they need to do to win in 2010 is to make sure that the economy doesn't recover. So they did everything they could to water down the bill and fill it with wasteful programs. Nearly 50% of the entire stimulus package was devoted to tax cuts that the GAO and even groups like Moody's Investor Services say will have virtually no short-term benefit to the economy. Then, when the economy is still bad in 2010, they will blame the problem entirely on Obama and they assume most Americans will be to stupid to know that they are being sold a line of bullshit. Unfortunately, they are probably right, and I suspect that the Dems will continue to be too spineless to do anything about it, even with their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

The problem is that tax cuts are not very stimulative when compared to federal spending:

http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.house.gov%2Fsmbiz%2Fhearings%2Fhearing-07-24-08-stimulus%2FZandi.pdf%23page%3D4

The link is from testimony to Congress about the stimulative effects of various measures (higher numbers are better). Looking particularly at the table on page 5, you can see that almost every type of spending beats almost every type of tax cut. And the guy giving the testimony (a guy by the name of Zandi, with Moody's - http://www.economy.com/dismal/bios.asp?author=25) is said to have been a McCain advisor, so it's not like this is a partisan thing.

We've been doing the tax cut thing for years. It didn't work. Now let's try something that does.

Every dollar "spent" on tax cuts generates tiny amounts of economic activity compared to money actually spent on things like food stamps or unemployment insurance.

For instance, food stamps generate $1.73 worth of economic activity per dollar spent. Unemployment generates $1.64. Tax cuts to businesses to spur spending on capital investments (such as accelerated depreciation) only generates $.27 worth of economic activity. A lump-sum refund, like you're proposing, generates only $1.02 worth of economic activity. Increasing infrastructure spending, on the other hand, generates $1.59 worth of economic activity.
  -- Mark Zandi, of Moody's Economy

Your "common sense" is what allowed this problem to grow and fester under the Bush Administration for the past eight years.

The reaction to the sniper reveals a lot about Americans' perception of risk

THE suburbs of the nation's capital are locked down. The Washington Area Girls Soccer League went on with its 2001 tournament despite the September 11th attacks. This year's event was cancelled because of the sniper who has killed nine people in the Washington area. Hundreds of schools have been operating under a "code blue", which prohibits all outdoor activity. Autumnal trips to pumpkin patches have been cancelled. And for those who dare to venture out of their homes, traffic dragnets designed to trap the killer's white van cause hours of delay.

Further on we get "experts" who incidentally are never identified in the story (unless it happens to be Kip Viscusi who isn't quoted as saying such a thing):

So it is fair to say both that people are understandably alarmed, and that they are still exaggerating the risk. Why? Experts seem to agree that Americans find it harder than most people to evaluate risks accurately. Lawsuits, labels on coffee cups ("Warning: the beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot"), even political pronouncements all often suggest it is possible to avoid danger altogether.

My point here is how did a claim like this, without supporting evidence of any kind, slip through the editing process? Especially, given how perfect the Economist is claimed to be by some of the extravagant sibling replies? And this isn't the first time nor the last where I saw serious bias (usually pro-business, pro-globalism, or pro-EU) or unwarranted claims made in Economist stories, it's just a story for which I have a ready link.

The Economist is an excellent journal, but I don't consider it superior (as a business/economics news source) to say the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times both which exhibit some of the same flaws as the Economist. And as far as online news sources go, I prefer the Dismal Scientist instead (though they have this weird fixation on central banks and a US focus that gets embarrassing sometimes).