It has finally occurred to me that most people will not realize that this thread was spawned by the derailment of this one . Appropriate crosslink will also be added there.

Although its good intentions to start a thread of this nature, it won't do much but start a flame war, point fingers, and blame whoever. There is so much misinformation floating around that no one really knows what the hell is going on with our ignorant government and how they pretty much crushed this country. Everyone has their own beliefs as to who or why. Only thing anyone can do is sit back, watch as it unfolds, and adjust yourself to the outcome of this dilemma. Or, as I always say, plan for the worst-hope for the best. Guess we will find out shortly though.

My intention is not to start a flame war and the reason why is simple, I don't have a ferret in this fight. I do have opinions about whether certain things are being done correctly, not correctly, could be done better, etc. BUT. For every reason I have supporting one of those opinions I can probably give you at least as many opposing it.

Ridiculous! You say. No, reality I say. Because the essence of every real life decision especially when it comes to something like economics that is, or at least in many ways can be in large part human psychology, is to gather as much relevant data as possible, weigh it with the best tools and insight that you can muster and then make the best decision that circumstances permit. Then continuously gather more data and re-evaluate until that particular decision is moot.

This is something that people on neither the left nor the right will EVER understand because they want simple black and white answers. God forbid that the facts should sully their "world view" or talking points. Oh, no. They have a word for people who see things differently.

WITCH!!!

I'm going to keep this short because I know you won't believe a word I say but of the reason for that is to even begin to understand economic policy you have to understand the concepts involved and that usually requires at least a semester of macroeconomics - which barely scratches the surface.

The reaction I normally get to that is that I'm being elitist, and yet if someone from CERN said that you needed to understand operator theory and subspace invariance before they could talk to you about quantum mechanics, you'd just nod and go 'uh huh.'

Well neither is technically true in the sense that you can still talk about the concepts in both cases, but it is true in that some of the concepts don't really make a lot of sense unless you understand at least some of the theory.

So, if you look up economic stimulus, what you will find is that most economists believe that govt are SUPPOSED to spend during recessions and save during expansion - exactly opposite of what intuition tells you but there are solid reasons for that. Our problem is that we tend to spend on BOTH sides. So if you want to complain about spending, I'm right there with you - but you're doing it at precisely the WRONG time.

Is there waste in govt? Sure, but bigger and bigger chunks are entitlements. Are we going to push gramma out on an ice floe? Of course not. But let's not forget that something like $2T or more went to pay for 2 wars, only one of which was arguably necessary and even there billions upon billions just disappeared. So sure, let's try to save, but let's make sure we watch EVERY dollar, not just the ones that pay for things we might not like.

In a word, not even close, or rather: no. If you really think things are that simple, I'm not even sure where to start.