but of course you know that addtional borrowing is not because of the stimulus?
It's because we have had a decade of weak GDP growth that is not keeping pace with social security, medicare and defense spending. A decade that saw barely 30K jobs created a month when we were averaging 300K a jobs a month in the 90s.
Had there been no stimulus bill, you'd still be borrowing $27K per house largely on account of the economy going into the ditch after decade of truely insane lending and investing that some pretty smart people assured us would reign itself in before it all ended in tears. Well didn't really play out that way and everyone's business has suffered because the one thing we can't afford to mess with is banks and lending.
I really hope some day that people start to realize that discretionary spending (like the stimulus bill) is about a dime vs. the 90 cents of deficit entitlement spending every year. Which would make the stimulus and even the bank bailout about a penny in comparsion to the size of the red ink.
To date, neither Obama, nor
any[U] Republican has dared to put forward cuts to the 90 cent part of that bill, the one that adds 90 cents of debt every year when the best either party can put forward from is about 4 cents in cuts. That's right for all this budget fighting in this new Congress they're fighting over nickels when they know full well we're talking silver dollars every year. We should have this paid off by the year 2500.
p.s.
You cant' move a $14 Trillion economy with an $800 billion stimulus bill. Especially not when 2/3's of that was tax breaks, tax incentives and aid to the states (red and blue alike) to keep them from going bankrupt overnight. Which leaves you with $250 billion in actual stimulus -- to be spread over several years-
Point is we never had a stimulus, we got one life preserver for an entire ship of people that all went into the water. A stimulus bill geared toward blue collar manufacturing might have worked but that sort of thing would have cost a heck of a lot more than $200 billion because you're talking heavy machinery, job training, improving infrastructure on the level of a population of 400 million. It would require borrowing like we did during World War II. Which is almost what we're doing today but its going towards consumption by older Americans (medicare, social security) rather than production by younger Americans (engineering, tech, science, etc.).