Quick Aside
This makes the contents of the stimulus package, and its relative emphasis on highways, much more disconcerting:
At least one-quarter of House Democrats’ proposed $825 billion economic stimulus plan wouldn’t be spent until at least 2011, according to a report that suggests the package may take longer than expected to boost the economy.
A Congressional Budget Office analysis said most of the plan’s $355 billion in appropriations for programs such as highway construction wouldn’t be spent until after 2010. The government would spend about $26 billion of that money this year and $110 billion more next year, the report estimated. It projected the government would spend $103 billion in 2011, $53 billion in 2012 and $63 billion from 2013 to 2019.
If you know the money will be spent over this time frame, but there aren’t enough good projects right now to fill in the blanks, you put in markers or you divide the bill up into installments. This is a bit frustrating.
January 20th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
This was my worry from the start and the reason that infrastructure is best built for infrastructure’s sake, not as a jobs program.
OK, back to the inauguration.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:59 am
Food for thought ..
“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”
…
“The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”