Try "evidence for fiscal stimulus," with the quotation marks. Maybe that is funny wording, but only three results come up (plus this post, presumably, soon enough), and two of them are from this blog.
I thank Leigh Caldwell for the pointer, here is his interesting post (includes a joke) on that same topic.
Bad news for your side, Tyler:
Searching for “no evidence of fiscal stimulus” (in quotes) produces 0 results! (But maybe this comment will appear soon).
“evidence that fiscal stimulus” gives 222 hits
“evidence that fiscal stimulus works” gives 8
Killing the camel and drinking its blood story, I think, comes from a real incident.Emperor Baber and his pregnant wife travelled through the desert once and when they did not have a drop of water, the emperor killed his camel with his sword and gave blood to his wife.
“Since everyone always whines about lack of evidence, has anyone considered turning the present situation into a controlled experiment?”
Yeah, the government considered that possibility and made sure not to.
Ive noticed that recently this blog has seemed to be reduced to critiquing everything that Obama is doing without offering up any alternative solutions. It would be nice for some constructive alternatives.
“recently this blog has seemed to be reduced to critiquing everything that Obama is doing without offering up any alternative solutions”
There’s a lot to critique. Since Obama spent his entire campaign fomenting discontent, I think criticism
has been rather muted given the unmitigated disaster his first month has been.
James,
Step1.
End the payroll tax. Good for the hardworking poor….should be appealing to Republicans becuase it is ending a tax!
Step2.
Stop bombing afgahnistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
Step 3:
Bring troops home from Germany/Korea/Japan and about 500 other bases around the world. Fire the secretary o Defense and hire someone in the military who is a fan of Marine Genreal Smedley Butler.
Step 4.
Adopt the Swedish plan of 1812…a declaration of neutrality…stop all foreign aid to Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Step 5
End all tax and penalty restrictions on 401k plans…it is the people’s money and let us use our private property what we desire.
Step 6
Address Health Care industry by getting rid of the FDA(fire everyone) and vastly deregulating the restrictive medical licensing statutes nwo in place.
Step 7
Allow congress to audit the Federal Reserve and Ft Knox…put Ron Paul on the head of the committee doing this.
It may turn up barely any results, but now it’s one of the fastest-rising searches for February 19!
http://google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X&date=2009-2-19
I have to agree with Brian Moore. We not only have no evidence that the stimulus plan just enacted will work, we have abundant theoretical doubts. On the other hand, there are abundant theoretical reasons to believe in some alternatives, if we really must do something. For instance, immediate and permanent elimination of the corporate income tax. I don’t know if that would cost more or less than $800 billion under static government budgeting calculus, but if it’s too much I’d settle for a rate reduction to 10%. If our standard is common sense in the absence of evidence, this is certainly superior to the Obama plan.
But let’s get real. This debate isn’t really about stimulus at all. It’s an orgy of rent-seeking that we’ve been waiting 8 long years to enact.
A great demonstration of the amazing adaptability of linkspammers – 24 hours later, Google now returns 91 results for “evidence for fiscal stimulus” – a 30-fold increase.
Someone must be scanning that Google Trends page pretty regularly…
Economics of towing
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