Posted on 04/25/2012 5:04:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
President Obama imposed a big-spending faux stimulus program on the economy back in 2009, claiming that the government needed to squander about $800 billion to keep the unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent.
How did that work out? One possible description is that the so-called stimulus became a festering pile of manure. About three years have passed, and the joblessness rate hasnt dropped below 8 percent. But the White House has been sprinkling perfume on that pile of you-know-what and claiming that the Keynesian spending binge was good policy.
But not every politician is blindly ideological like Obama. Vitor Gaspar, Portugals Finance Minister, is willing to admit error. Here are some relevant excerpts from a New York Times report.
Mr. Gaspar, speaking to The New York Times last week, has a message for observers who say Europe needs to substantially relax its austerity approach: We tried stimulus and it backfired. Like some other European countries, Portugal tried what Mr. Gaspar called a Keynesian style expansion in 2008, referring to a theory by economist John Maynard Keynes. But it didnt turn things around, and may have made things worse.
Why does the Portuguese Finance Minister have this view? Well, for the simple reason that the economy got worse and more spending put his country in a deeper fiscal ditch.
The yield on Portuguese government bonds more than 11 percent on longer-term bonds is substantially higher than the yields on debt issued by Ireland, Spain or Italy. The main fear among investors is that Portugal is going to have to ask for a second bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, which committed $103 billion of financial aid in 2011.
Maybe the big spenders in Portugal should import some of the statist bureaucrats at Congressional Budget Office. The CBO folks could then regurgitate the moving-goalposts argument that theyve used in the United States and claim that the economy would be even weaker if the government hadnt wasted more money.
But perhaps the Portuguese left doesnt think that will pass the laugh test.
Amazingly, the Germans, who have a disturbing affinity for powerful government, decided against Keynesianism and thats paid dividends for their economy.
In any event, some of us can say we were right from the beginning about this issue.Obama's So-Called Stimulus: Good For Government, Bad For the Economy
Not that being right required any keen insight. Keynesian policies failed for Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s. So-called stimulus policies also failed for Japan in 1990s. And Keynesian proposals failed for Bush in 2001 and 2008.
Just in case any politicians are reading this post, Ill make a point that normally goes without saying: Borrowing money from one group of people and giving it to another group of people does not increase prosperity.
But since politicians probably arent capable of dealing with a substantive argument, lets keep it simple and offer three very insightful cartoons: here, here, and here.
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