Economic Stimulus Has Little to Do With Economic Growth According to… CNN?

CNN recently published an article on their website claiming what many of us believed anyway: the stimulus bill has had very limited effect on the economy.

According to a recent survey of economists, the stimulus bill “had little to do with the rebound”. First of all, I take principle with the “economic rebound” people keep talking about, but I’ve already beaten that issue more times than I’ve beaten Super Mario World.

I’ve only beaten that game once.

Even though for the first time in two years, according to the article, employers report growth in the private sector, these economists believe the stimulus had very little to do with it.

Instead of feeding the public sector by pumping random amounts of money into it, the government should have provided emergency tax breaks to business-owners to offset the credit crunch created by the collapse of the housing bubble. With this type of funding, businesses might not have had to lay off as many workers.

Alternatively, the government decided to expand the public sector. The administration totes having created nearly 3.5 million jobs because of the stimulus, but many of these jobs are temporary, some of which reportedly only lasting a day in some places.

In fact, in the same survey, the National Association for Business Economics polled sixty eight of its members who own firms in the private sector. A full seventy three percent of them said that only growth they experienced had little or nothing to do with the stimulus bill.

However, even though I’ve said many times that the administration is wrong with its overly optimistic outlook of the economy, the report also claims that industrial demand is increasing, which calls for an increase in the number of jobs. In the same poll, seventy percent of respondents believe the private economy should grow more than two percent by the end of 2010, which seems like a feat in of itself.

One last point the survey mentions is that the credit crunch is still being felt by small businesses. This ties into my last blog, because if Congress were to regulate the credit industry as it plans on doing, the predicted private sector growth could falter.

Read the CNN story here: http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/26/news/economy/NABE_survey
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Chris Buchheit

Chris Buchheit was born under the hot Floridian sun during some year in the 1980s. There he studied school matters until moving to North Carolina in 1999. Possibly due to the fact that his mom had enough of him being inside all the time, he quickly got involved in community affairs via the Boy Scouts of America, where he learned the values of citizenship, morality, duty to God and country, and that the biggest kids get to boss around the smaller ones. Chris attained the rank of Eagle Scout in 2004, and still values the rank as one of his proudest achievements. Beginning in 2006, Chris began attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he quickly learned the value of basketball and poplar trees. Since attending UNC, Chris has been double majoring in Asian Studies, with a concentration in Chinese, and Political Science. When he isn’t slaving over his honors thesis, looking up a bunch of Chinese Characters, volunteering, or mindlessly browsing the same websites over and over, Chris enjoys writing short stories and novels. Much to his roommates’ annoyance, he also spends his free time learning to play the guitar. Above all else, though, Chris values God, his family, and his friends. For the future, Chris plans to apply to Georgetown to further his studies in Political Science, hopefully with a concentration on China. Pending acceptance into Georgetown, Chris would like to study while gaining professional experience in a government job in Washington DC.

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