The stimulus package was meant to be over a trillion dollars, and spent mostly on ready-made infrastructure projects that pay for future growth, but instead it’s become a package that’s 20% smaller and is half saturated with tax cuts. Right now we need public transportation systems. We need subways, high speed rail, buses. We need investment in green energy. We need the complete nationalization of banks like Bank of America and Citigroup and the resulting elimination of their shareholders.
In short, we need to start anew and invest in it.
We can’t have a half-assed program that will only saddle us with more debt; we need a big stimulus package that can be quickly spent on important projects that we’ve been neglecting: Fixing bridges, building infrastructure, supporting research and development. If we look to Japan, we will see that its lost decade is not what we want to simulate–but unfortunately we’re doing just that. The US won’t go into a depression like in the 1930s, but it will not resume normal growth for a long time unless prompt action is taken now.
If people don’t want to spend, tax cuts won’t help much. Instead we need the government to take initiative and put people back on work doing things that should’ve been done long time ago.