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Edmunds.com ticks off white house, Same argument goes for home owner tax credit....

Started by Riversider
almost 17 years ago
Posts: 13573
Member since: Apr 2009
Discussion about
http://www.edmunds.com/help/about/press/159446/article.html Cash for Clunkers Results Finally In: Taxpayers Paid $24,000 per Vehicle Sold, Reports Edmunds.com SANTA MONICA, Calif. — October 28, 2009 — Edmunds.com, the premier resource for online automotive information, has determined that Cash for Clunkers cost taxpayers $24,000 per vehicle sold. Nearly 690,000 vehicles were sold during the Cash... [more]
Response by Riversider
almost 17 years ago
Posts: 13573
Member since: Apr 2009

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aUuHhaDx8Hr8

Dispensing Lucre

When the government distributes lucre or loot, people spend it. If your interest is national income accounting, spending other people’s money is great. Spending is a back-door way for government statisticians to measure what matters, which is the real output of goods and services.

But the government has no money of its own to spend; only what it borrows or confiscates from us via taxation. Oops.

“Government job creation is an oxymoron,” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business. It is only by depriving the private sector of funds that government can hire or subsidize hiring.

That’s why “jobs created or saved” is such pure fiction. It ignores what’s unseen, as our old friend Frederic Bastiat explained so eloquently 160 years ago in an essay.

Econometric models synthesize all sorts of variables and spit out a GDP forecast. From there they derive the change in employment using something called Okun’s Law, named after the late economist Arthur Okun, which describes the relationship between the two.

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