Redux: Suicide Faster

clipped from hotair.com As Reason magazine recently reported, the Obama administration’s “stimulus” approach is almost an exact duplicate of the policies that led to Japan’s “Lost Decade”: The Japanese government’s easing of credit rates, instead of spurring real demand, created artificial demand. Federal loans and stimulus spending were not economically productive, and they vastly increased the nation’s debt and prolonged the economic malaise. Worse, businesses spent critical time on the sidelines, waiting for government bailouts and other centralized actions, instead of speedily consolidating their losses, clearing their balance sheets of bad investments, and reorganizing. So Baker’s spat with the Washington Post over the need for a second “stimulus” is a pathetic sideshow. The first “stimulus” is, in fact, damaging the prospects for recovery and the debate over a second dose of the same poison is basically about whether we should commit economic suicide faster.