Giving Obama’s Stimulus Package a Closer Look

January 14th, 2009 | by alexis |

President-elect Barack Obama’s proposed economic stimulus package has garnered a great deal of hope and optimism from those being directly affected by the recession, but that doesn’t exactly mean our country’s financial tide will turn on January 20 when the Illinois senator is sworn into office.

In fact, Obama’s camp has been quite tentative recently in their willingness to offer up a specific estimate of how many jobs could be created in the next year. And, despite obtaining a full-length laundry list of operatives governors have declared their states in need of, it’s widely expected that such initiatives won’t be put into place until the beginning or middle of 2010.

Part of the reason is based on political reality. Obama hasn’t taken office yet, and this stimulus package, for now, is nothing more than a big idea. Yes, the plan reportedly includes $300 billion in tax cuts intended to attract Republican support in Congress, but there has yet to be any significant signal that the G.O.P supports the package, which could result in massive delays before any headway is made.

In the meantime, many predictions have the economy continuing on its current path, experiencing what Anthony Karydakis calls “additional contraction.”

It’s Karydakis’ prediction, based on our country’s history of fiscally-stimulated packages, that this one will “produce results too late to alleviate the near-term pain and, actually, tend to take effect when the economy is already in the process of recovering on its own and needs such help the least.”

There’s little doubt that in time the economy will begin to right itself. America’s been put in states of economic crises before and consistently seems to find a way out of the situation over time. So the question remains: when this ship is finally righted, will Americans be thanking Barack Obama’s ingenuity or themselves?

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