Done correctly this stimulus package can stimulate our economy.
Done incorrectly all it will do is inflate our money supply without stimulating our economy one bit.
The more I read about the current plan, the less confidence I have it is going to work.
How do you give away enough money to make this work?
No you have to invest it into productive projects that actually have some benefit to society.
How does the Federal Government hire enough people
The government mostly doesn't hire anyone...it pays for profit companies to do work like building bridges and roads,.
to offset the monetary drain their salaries are creating on the still shrinking tax base?
It doesn't...it creates fiat dollars (or borrows money from other economies) to foot the costs temperarily hoping that by breaking increasing confidence (because people have jobs) those who are hoarding their money right now will start spending it again.
I don't see how this can work. We have to creaete money out of thin air like we did during our heyday in the 80's, and giving away and hiring people with money we don't have is not the key.
That is true...except most of those fiat dollars went to a very small segment of the population who do not spend them, but rather who invested them in bubbles like real estate, bonds on real estate, the hi tech bubble and so forth.
And then those bubble popped and suddenly there's no money in circulation and people get scared.
I have a hard time seeing how this or any "stimulus" plan will work until it addresses the meat and potatoes of the problem. Otherwise it's like putting jelly on burned toast.
How did the massive spending of FIAT dollars that paid for WWII get us out of the depression?
That's, in theory, how this will work.
But as I have pointed out already, I grow increasingly
less confident that the money we're currently going to spend
is enough, AND it is going to exactly the wrong people, too.
Our economy (and probably all the industrial economies on earth) are now so out of kilter precisely because too few people who too much money, and the consumers therefore do not have enough to SPEND MONEY.
It's way more complex than that, of course, but there's the root cause of our current crises in a nutshell.
Years and years and years of rewarding the supply side (the rich) while demanding that the demand side (the working class) pay most of the bills.
Well, now the rich have the vast majority of the money and how well is the economy going?