This video from Reason tv explains why the Obama stimulus failed to do much to stimulate the economy.
The quick explanation is that you can't lower unemployment by giving money to people who are already employed, and, in any event, government is poorly equipped to spend money efficiently enough to really stimulate anything.
The best way to get the economy going, it seems to me, is not to throw money around but to provide incentives to business to hire people, and the best way to do that is to relieve the various economic burdens weighing them down.
Rather than follow the current model of imposing increasingly higher taxes, imposing increasingly onerous regulations, and imposing crushing costs as will be assessed against employers under Obamacare, we should lower the cost of doing business by reducing taxes, removing the threat of Obamacare, easing regulations, and exploiting our domestic energy resources so that fuel costs are reduced.
Not only would making energy more abundant reduce what it costs to manufacture and transport goods to market, it would put more money in the pockets of consumers, especially poorer consumers, which would enable them to purchase those products. The more products that are purchased the more products that'll be manufactured and the more manufacturing that's going on the more people who'll find employment.
Perhaps the Obama administration's policy of throwing massive amounts of money around, raising taxes and imposing ever more regulations on business will somehow work eventually, but after three years of it we're mired in the worst economy since the Great Depression. Blind faith is believing something despite the lack of empirical evidence, and there's certainly no empirical evidence that the Obama strategy has worked or will ever work.
Maybe it's time to take the ideological blinders off and try something, and someone, else.
