A mighty expensive stimulus

Michael Williams

Joseph Stiglitz puts the total cost of the Iraq war (including interest and repair/replacement of damaged military equipment) at 3 trillion, about one third more than the inflation-adjusted cost of the Vietnam war. Are you sure that our figure for Vietnam is inflation-adjusted?

TrevorsDen

You must be joking - it will all end up as pork.

At least this will put an end to the fallacy that the USA is a capitalist country. Whatever the USA has achieved it is despite the drain of federal spending.

I find it hard to believe that
a] this crisis is a bad as the level of bail out suggests (I presume this is on top of the money Bush has spent)
and
b] if it is I can only suggest that this will make matters worse not better as all this money has to come from somewhere.

If the USA is borrowing all this where will our own government borrow all its bail out bonanza from?

TGF UKIP

Old Irwin Stelzer has Obama's number far better than most. His article in yesterdays S. Times (and available at business.timesonline.co.uk) titled "Big Government will be Obam's New Deal" is an excellent one and emphasizes just how far to the left Obama and his crew are and where they intend to take the US

Looking at his background you would have to be delusional not to conclude that change really did mean change and in effect that change means for the US to become a european style social democracy.

The beacon that was America is going to grow increasingly dim in the next four years and we can only hope that God really does Bless America and it doesn't turn out to be eight years.

If the UK now really does need Maggie, The US is surely going to need RR.

mitch

The only people who will really benefit are politicians,bankers and directors of huge companies the rest of the country just get to pay for it all along with a generation as yet unborn.
No government should be allowed to borrow beyond its term,

Tuppy

It's over. Advanced economies are responding in exactly the wrong way: what is needed is thrift, frugality and industry, at personal and national levels. A recession essentially occurs because an economy has mutated inappropriately; it ends quickest when the mutations are pruned and the basics bolstered. It does not end with more mutation and distortion.

We are going down.

With the government waste, tinkering, expansion and illiberalism in the US and UK these past years, added to all the perversions fostered in our homes and hostelries, the cynicism and vanity of all our culture and morals, the destruction of the last vestiges of the Protestant work ethic and the final snapping of the old bonds of community, there is not an altar that has not been desecrated, a law that has not been perverted, a soul that has not been dirtied, in this once happy and faithful land, but that the deadly wages are at last returning home unto; and darkness falls at God's behest.

It will not lift for at least a decade, maybe longer.

porkbelly

The genius is Obama doesn't need to worry about actually taking control of the major sectors of the economy - the usual hurdle any socialist regime must overcome. Because the government will now control all the money that anyone is likely to be spending or investing for the foreseeable future he has all the power he and his crew need to effect "change". Watch for Congress to rush approval of sweeping but vague powers for the regime that will give it the right to dispense these staggering sums of money with the general goal of re-inventing the United States as an egalitarian nanny state.

Susan Hill

In 10 years time America will be unrecognisable. It will be the land of Government control and snooping, of a Benefit culture, political correctness, Green trumpery and state spending and a hugely bloated State sector. It will no longer be the land of Free Enterprise and Opportunity, religion on all sides will be oppressed, Islam and the Arab states will be pandered to until the foothold they gain holds open the door permanently. The rich will be poorer - but so will the poor, because these things never do filter down. The work ethic will be confined to a few middle class who will be despised for it. The change will have come and permanently. The US has never been a perfect society but it has been a free, democratic one in which anyone with determination and hard work can rise from nothing to a good life. It has been the land of philanthropy and generosity but that will wither and die because those things too, like Volunteering, will be despised in favour of the state.
Corruption, of course, will, thrive. It always does.
My generation have seen the best of America and the younger ones will not know what they have voted to lose until it is far far too late. I feel more pessimistic about the future of the USA under Obama than I have felt about almost anything. We will watch the gradual but relentless and deliberate destruction of the USA by the velvet gloved Obama whose iron fist is going to be stronger and more ruthless than any we have seen before.
I wish I were not so confident that all this would come to pass, I wish the generous hearted, free spirited Americans who are left would stand up to it the next election round. But I fear even by then they too will have been crushed.
Now please someone, tell me I`m wrong.