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Originally Posted by joshgirls
you should easily understand this yourself. After all, free market economies are much wealthier than communist economies. I assume you are smart enough to understand why.
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You obviously aren't smart enough to understand that there may be other reasons for a nation's prosperity other than the old capitalist/socialist argument.
There are lots of economies out there that tried to do it our way and are worse off now than they were before. Just because it appears to have worked here doesn't mean it's the be all end all of economic theory.
Yeah I'm sure our climate, arable land, vast natural resources, and the fact that our infrastructure was left intact during WWII while most of the "communist" or "soon to be communist" countries were reduced to a pile of rubble has nothing to do with our prosperity since the 1940's.
It's all just because of capitalism.
Yeah, ok.
Quote:
Originally Posted by joshgirls
not exactly. the feds have spent only 4 trillion of nearly 13 trillion in guarantees. The 13 trillion may or may not eventually be spent.
either way, the next 4 years will be the grande test of keynsian philosophy AKA can a government spend a country into recovery? Since the bailout is repaying the losses of wealthy bankers, instead of helping the people who got laid off because of the bankers behavior, my prediction is trillions have been spent with no benefit to the economy at all. Snake Doctor would probably agree that trickle down economics is a fraud, & it is. The bailout money is not going to reach consumers, so you can forget any recovery based off either the bailouts or the stimulus.
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Don't confuse bank bailouts and the interconnectedness of the international money markets with Keynesian economics.
The stimulus bill was Keynesian. The other stuff (which was mostly done by the Bush administration btw) is totally different and unprecedented as far as I know.
It remains to be seen whether we'll get back all or most of the money that was used to prop up the system so that it could be deleveraged in an orderly fashion.
If the other option was to let Lehman happen all over again, times 10, then obviously this was the right thing to do.
We're in uncharted territory here though, and for either of us to pretend that we know exactly what's going to happen now is ridiculous.
Remember though that these are guarantees or loans, not direct spending, so don't lump them all together with the stimulus bill and act like they're the same thing because they're not.
