Certainly, the stimulus package as put together is perhaps worse than doing nothing. The heart of the problem is the binge of reckless mortgage loans on the bank’s books. I have already posted on how to end that. End it properly and we can have a booming dynamic economy. End it weakly by letting it to unfold slowly will delay recovery for years. The stimulus package increases public debt to serve visibly futile political ends.
If it actually supports a rebuild of infrastructure across the country, then at least some good will come out of it. Accelerating necessary programs in place is a reasonable form of stimulus.
The Chinese have the right of it all. Let millions of migrant workers go home and help stimulate the home front for a while.
The other good news out of China is that the downswing may already be ended. Reorders have kicked in and some numbers are rising or at least standing still.
The reason that I talk about China is that 60% of their business is internal. That means that they can achieve complete recovery just on the growth of internal demand in a very few of years, even if we were all simply to disappear.
The time has come for us to rethink our macro economic assumptions. Fast tracking the mortgage industry which is the only problem facing us will fast track the economy back to health. The auto industry can go chapter 11 and end their present economic disadvantage in which their competitors are trouncing them while building product next door. Protectionism is impossible in the auto industry because of this, except in the wet dreams of the union leadership.
In fact, it would merely encourage the local operations of Toyota and its ilk to crank up a massive investment aimed at grabbing market share from the big three. It would be laughable.
Anyway, bailing out Detroit will add no new jobs unless Americans can buy cars. That means they have to clean up their balance sheets and settle obligations properly with the banks. That also means refinancing credit card debt with term loans.
The eagerness of the lending business to turn loan obligations into usury must be brought under firm regulatory control.
The best solution there is to have such debt frozen and paid out at a low interest rate until settled and blocking any further credit until fully paid out by income or the time frame of the amortization whichever is greater.
Jacking such debt with fees and charges is abusive and likely counter productive.
Again, solving the mortgage jackpot now reloads the banks to do business again. Anything else is folly and solves nothing
Instead of stimulus, do nothing – seriously
Stimulus is unconstitutional. And history shows that the economy can recover strongly on its own, if politicians stay out of the way.
By Robert Higgs
from the February 9, 2009 edition
Oakland, Calif. - As we wait to see how the politicians in Washington will alter the stimulus package the Obama administration is pushing, many questions are being raised about the measure's contents and efficacy. Should it include money for the National Endowment for the Arts, Amtrak, and child care? Is it big enough to get the economy moving again? Does it spend money fast enough? Hardly anyone, however, is asking the most important question: Should the federal government be doing any of this?
In raising this question, one risks immediate dismissal as someone hopelessly out of touch with the modern realities of economics and government. Yet the United States managed to navigate the first century and a half of its past – a time of phenomenal growth – without any substantial federal intervention to moderate economic booms and busts. Indeed, when the government did intervene actively, under Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the result was the Great Depression.
Until the 1930s, the Constitution served as a major constraint on federal economic interventionism. The government's powers were understood to be just as the framers intended: few and explicitly enumerated in our founding document and its amendments. Search the Constitution as long as you like, and you will find no specific authority conveyed for the government to spend money on global-warming research, urban mass transit, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, or countless other items in the stimulus package and, even without it, in the regular federal budget.
This Constitutional constraint still operated as late as the 1930s, when federal courts issued some 1,600 injunctions to restrain officials from carrying out acts of Congress, and the Supreme Court overturned the New Deal's centerpieces, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and other statutes. This judicial action outraged President Roosevelt, who fumed that "we have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce." Early in 1937, he responded with his court-packing plan.
Although Roosevelt lost this battle, he soon won the war. As the older, more conservative justices retired, the president replaced them with ardent New Dealers such as Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas. The newly constituted court proceeded between 1937 and 1941 to overturn its anti-New Deal rulings, abandoning its traditional, narrow view of interstate commerce and giving the federal government carte blanche to spend, tax, and regulate virtually without limit.
After World War II, the government enacted the Employment Act of 1946, codifying the government's declared responsibility for managing the economy "to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power," and it has actively intervened ever since, purportedly to attain these declared ends. Its shots have often misfired, however, and we have endured booms and busts, a decade of stagflation, bouts of rapid inflation, and stock-market crashes. The present recession may become the worst since the passage of the Employment Act.
Federal intervention rests on the presumption that officials know how to manage the economy and will use this knowledge effectively. This presumption always had a shaky foundation, and we have recently witnessed even more compelling evidence that the government simply does not know what it's doing. The big bailout bill enacted last October; the Federal Reserve's massive, frantic lending for many different purposes; and now the huge stimulus package all look like wild flailing – doing something mainly for the sake of being seen to be doing something – and, of course, enriching politically connected interests in the process.
Our greatest need at present is for the government to go in the opposite direction, to do much less, rather than much more. As recently as the major recession of 1920-21, the government took a hands-off position, and the downturn, though sharp, quickly reversed itself into full recovery. In contrast, Hoover responded to the downturn of 1929 by raising tariffs, propping up wage rates, bailing out farmers, banks, and other businesses, and financing state relief efforts. Roosevelt moved even more vigorously in the same activist direction, and the outcome was a protracted period of depression (and wartime privation) from which complete recovery did not come until 1946.
The US government has shown repeatedly that as an economic manager it is not to be trusted. What we need most are authorities wise enough to follow the dictum, "First, do no harm." The stimulus package will do enormous harm. The huge debt burden it entails, by itself, ought to condemn the measure. America is already drowning in debt. But the measure will also wreak harm in countless other directions by effectively reallocating resources on a grand scale according to political priorities, rather than according to individual preferences and economic rationality. As our history shows, the economy can recover strongly on its own, if only the politicians will stay out of the way.
• Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy for The Independent Institute, editor of The Independent Review, and author of "Depression, War, and Cold War."
