Alan Greenspan summed it up best. It's not whether or not the Stimulus effects short term GPD, it's whether it "primes the pump" for private demand.

Pretty sure you could take a trillion dollars and invest it in bubblegum factories and it'd have some sort of impact. But will the stimulus produce long standing results?

I'm doubtful.

I've mentioned it before, but I'm of the humble opinion that the wealth that was "lost" never really existed in the first place. The debt we're now faced with has to be met in one of three likely ways. 1) Inflation, 2) High taxes (at the expense of growth) or 3) defaulting (god forbid). If we want to achieve long term success, we have to get out of this consumer driven economy and get back to producing things. Unless we can come up with something to sell to folks outside our borders and not just to ourselves, we'll be faced with the same pyramid scheme economy. Subsidizing this system by way of the federal government just pushes off whatever needs to get done.

My biggest beef with the stimulus package (and I have many) is that it became a political dumping ground for party agenda. It's not completely without it's merits. We're putting money into R&D on energy, which is good, and we are spending money on improving infrastructure, which is also good (help increase efficiency via better transportation/communication/shipping/whatever). We have a decent amount of tax cuts to help give people immediate relief. Unfortunately, with all the other nonsense, the important things end up getting less than they probably should.

An example. I'm a big fan of infrastructure spending. Specifically right now in our country, I see the opportunity for a serious investment into mass transit. We had a chance to do something big and bold, perhaps a national light rail system, but instead we constructed legislation that will lend itself not just to fraud and misuse, but piecemeal initiatives state by state that run the risk of having no rhyme or reason at all. The chances of a nation wide light rail now seem even smaller. And even if we can standardize on an approach within state legislatures or an approach is dictated by the Feds, the stimulus bill appropriates only a tiny fraction of funds to transportation itself.

The other debatable aspects to this bill are largely matters of principal. President Obama's on record in 1998 as disagreeing with Clinton's 1996 welfare reform, something Clinton himself touts as a big success of his presidency. This legislation rolled it back. States will now be rewarded for adding people to its welfare payroll, not the other way around. The stimulus bill went on to stick its hands into health care and gun control as well. What on earth these things have to do with "priming the pumps of private demand," as Greenspan articulated, is anyone's guess.

That is, anyone's guess just as soon as they finish reading the dang thing. (Oooohhhh. AmIright?!)

The other, more gloomy, concern is whether or not we'll have enough credit left in the treasury to handle whatever geopolitical fallout comes from the "financial crisis". Iceland's government already fell, there are rumors of Mexico's being unstable and there are protests and uprisings taken place on the other side of the Atlantic. If this truly is a comparable event to the Great Depression, as our leaders love to suggest, we may want to think a couple steps ahead on this one.. Just.. you know.. saying.

I do have to say that I've enjoyed it all. It's history in the making. I'm also happy to see the GOP find it's conservative roots again. Whether or not they mean it this time, we'll have to wait and see. So far Michael Steele seems like a breath of fresh air.

I'm also humored by the amount of folks on the opposite side of the aisle tossing terms like "obstructionists" around. I saw one liberal professor on TV attacking a conservative talking head, asking where this outrage was while the patriot act was being debated. A fair point, but the real question is where was the Democrats outrage? For all the talk they do about the war and the patriot act, you'd assume that they voted against them. The job of the minority party is to balance out the majority. To slow down waves of emotion. To provide a counter argument. To, quite frankly, obstruct. There's a time and a place for bipartisanship but this, as well as the patriot act and the war votes, was simply not one of them. There's simply too much on the line. If the majority wants to pass sweeping legislation, it doesn't do much harm to make them earn it. If nothing else, we likely ended up with a 'better' bill because of it.