Media Matters for America wrote:
Media Matters: Fundamentally flawed stimulus coverage
From: Media Matters for America [action@mediamatters.org]
Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 7:43 PM
To: tomc2322
Subject: Media Matters: Fundamentally flawed stimulus coverageFundamentally flawed stimulus coverage
by Jamison Foser
If there’s one fact that should be made clear in every news report about the stimulus package working its way through Congress, it is this: Government spending is stimulative.
That’s a basic principle of economics, and understanding it is essential to assessing any stimulus package. So it should be an underlying premise of the media’s coverage of the stimulus debate. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case. Indeed, reporters routinely suggest that spending is not stimulative.
Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, explains: “Spending that is not stimulus is like cash that is not money. Spending is stimulus, spending is stimulus. Any spending will generate jobs. It is that simple. … Any reporter who does not understand this fact has no business reporting on the economy.”
(emphasis mine)
Letting a contract to cut the grass around the mall is spending and spending is stimulus. It creates an immediate impact in the form of jobs. It gets money moving again. But to hear the Repugs tell it, spending to cut grass is wasteful. Right now, with our situation the way it is, there is no such thing as wasteful spending. The immediate impact is jobs but it is a lot more than that.
Jobs, rather the income from jobs, buys goods and services. Defense spending buys goods. Republicans argue tax cuts is a faster way to inject cash into markets so Joe the Plumber can work again. You can see that with a 2.6 million job loss, there is much less income to rescue from taxes, and consequently much less taxes rebated. It’s that simple. Hiring workers can start tomorrow if a contractor is notified that his contract with the government has been doubled.
Unfortunately, many of the reporters who have shaped the stimulus debate don’t seem to understand that.
ABC’s Charles Gibson portrayed spending and stimulus as opposing concepts in a question to President Obama: “And as you know, there’s a lot of people in the public, a lot of members of Congress who think this is pork-stuffed and that it really doesn’t stimulate. A lot of people have said it’s a spending bill and not a stimulus.”
President Obama said that spending is stimulus, stimulus is spending.
The more you listen to FOX News the more misinformed you become.
specifically, most people want the politicians to stop bickering and do things they want done. A single mother working two minimum-wage jobs to feed her kids might want politicians to come together in a spirit of bipartisanship — but she doesn’t want them to pass bipartisan legislation lowering the minimum wage; she wants a bipartisan bill raising the minimum wage. If she can’t have that, I suspect she’d take a party-line minimum-wage increase, even if it means a decrease in the bonhomie at Washington cocktail parties she’ll never attend.
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