Obama Stimulus Pours Millions Into Cyber Security 156
nandemoari writes "As his administration continues to work on a stimulus plan that can save America's economy, Obama's latest course of action will see millions of dollars being allocated to heighten cyber security. The move will assist government officials in preventing future attacks on the United States.
The President recently addressed his 2010 budget, outlining funding plans that will grant the Department of Homeland Security $355 million to secure the nation's most essential computer systems.
The money will be spent on both government and private groups, with much of the funding going to the National Cyber Security Division and the Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative programs."
Frist (Score:4, Insightful)
"The money will be spent on both government and private groups, with much of the funding going to the National Cyber Security Division and the Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative programs."
In other words, millions of your tax dollars will be spent paying glorified security guards to sit on P2p networks all day looking for copyright infringers and kiddy porn. As if the FBI needed any competition. What, did you think they were actually saving America from terrorists?
Re:Frist (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is my problem with the p2p babysitting -
what guidelines will they be using to determine what is child porn and what is not?
Some of the recent "child model" busts seem to be pushing the limit of what can be called "child porn". It's almost as if they're widening the definition of child porn so they'll have more people to bust.
Re:Frist (Score:5, Interesting)
It's almost as if they're widening the definition of child porn so they'll have more people to bust.
Call me cynical but I don't think they care about having "more people" to bust. The Man isn't out to get us. The Man is out to generate splashy headlines and get elected to higher office. Nothing generates splasher headlines than "Think of the Children!"
Re:Frist (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't call you cynical for that viewpoint, I'd call you naive.
Of course the "Man" is looking for more people to bust - law enforcement is a huge industry worth billions of dollars, and like all industries, it is seeking to grow itself. And in law enforcement, how do you grow your market and secure jobs? You create more criminals.
Re:Frist (Score:4, Interesting)
Did any of you even read the summary? Does anyone here even know the jurisdiction of the department of homeland security? Just to clarify something for any of you presumptuous douche bags, this has to do with the Slashdot articles that you have read (assuming you've even looked at the title) that involve China and highly sensitive US data gone missing. This is to protect that data and any intrusion that could happen in the future. Quite frankly, it's embarrassing that anyone managed to get a hold of that data, and it better not happen on this president's watch.
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The DHS did not exist under Clinton. Nice try, cluebie.
Lots, gigs, of data was siphoned off US servers in the last few years. Hypothesised by some as Chinese attacks, although a lot of compromised servers exist in China and could have been used to bounce off.
e.g. http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/china-accused-of-stealing-american-technology/2007/11/16/1194766968231.html [smh.com.au]
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Actually, I think he was talking about Charlie Tree and the bags of Chinese campaign money floating around and the data secretes being stolen at the los alamos labs that lead China turned out to have.
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"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against--then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it.
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, whe
Re:Frist (Score:5, Interesting)
Call me cynical but I don't think they care about having "more people" to bust.
I disagree with that point.
They're obviously not catching a lot of terrorists so they need other numbers to justify their budget. They get their numbers by picking the low-hanging fruit after broadening the definition of "low-hanging" fruit, especially if it goes "across state lines", which almost all internet traffic does.
"The Man is out to generate splashy headlines and get elected to higher office. Nothing generates splasher headlines than "Think of the Children!"
True, and it's convenient for both law enforcement seeking bigger budgets and politicians seeking advancement. It's not convenient for your 16 year old son or daughter who has to register as a sex offender for life because they stored nekkid pics of themselves on their cell phone or computer.
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I thought the whole problem was caused by thinking about the children.
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America has gone crazy over the sex crimes issue.
There is one city in Palm Beach County, Fl. that has restricted the areas in which sex offenders can live so severely that every offender in the city lives under the same bridge. That is the only spot that is more than 1500 ft. from a school in the entire city. But controlling where offenders live has not helped reduce sex crimes even by a fraction of one per cent.
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I think the point of that restriction was to bully them into moving to another city. It's not necessarily about stopping sex crimes as much as stopping them near you.
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That would remind me of how Stalin always found new groups of people to send to the gulags, by widening the definition of [insert random word meaning what we nowadays call "terrorists"].
He had to, because people in the gulags were "consumed". They died so quick that the government could not get new people quick enough.
But what would be the reason here?
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"what guidelines will they be using to determine what is child porn and what is not?"
Sophisticated TLAR (That Looks About Right) age guesstimation technigues and IOA (Inspecting Official Arousal) metrics will ensure fair and unbiased content review.
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They're attempting to secure the economic systems and the critical infrastructure around that so they can maintain and increase the inequality between the rich and the poor without losing control of the citizenry.
We need a meltdown, and the only reason he's there is to prevent it.
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In other words...
They're going to spend millions of dollars on some new routers and STILL leave critical systems connected to the internet or systems which can access critical systems leaving them vulnerable to cyber attack despite any increased security.
Like they say about corporate networks. Tough on the outside, gooey on the inside. That's exactly whats going to happen with this 'stimulus'
Re:Frist (Score:5, Informative)
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There are already some pretty fair computer specialists working in this capacity for the government. Hiring a few more might actually help increase national security. Some civilian specialists are attached to the military or agencies such as NSA.
In other news, "The People's Cube"... (Score:5, Interesting)
...announces the Hope'N'Change Operating System [thepeoplescube.com]. "Only 30% chance of crashing!"
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It is obviously another Mojave experiment [mojaveexperiment.com] ;-)
Re:Let me be the first to ask... (Score:2)
...but does it run on Linux?
Re:I know, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The US is (ideally) both a democracy and a republic. Democracy, rule by the people, is the strategy. Republicanism, the particular structure of our government, is a tactic. The two are mutually supporting, not mutually exclusive.
There are republics which aren't democracies, and democracies which aren't republics; the latter are generally much better places to live than the former. Hint: any country which has the words "Democratic Republic" in its name is lying with the first word, but usually not the s
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Awww. False dichotomy win?
Palin/Romney 2012! I'll take leaders who believe that the earth is 6,000 years old for $200, Alex.
The sad thing is, you probably really believe what you just posted is actually true.
Because it sure isn't like news media to deliberately paint an inaccurate picture of any candidate, now is it?
Or are you too brain-addled to remember "fake-but-accurate"?
And FWIW, I'd rather have someone in charge who believes wrongly about irrelevant things like how old the Earth is than some pandering twit who things he can tax and spend his way out of a recession despite all evidence to the contrary.
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Regurgitation is not intelligence. Knowing the facts does help. Anyone can repeat the definitions of a Republic and a Democracy. What's interesting is that you said, "we can get back to the idea that growth and prosperity are driven by PEOPLE pursuing 'self interest rightly understood.'" You're absolutely right, but that's a democratic ideal, not a republican one in the classical sense. Remember, people advocated a republic instead of a democracy because they thought slaves, women, and non-land owners were
Re:I know, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone can repeat the definitions of a Republic and a Democracy. Remember, people advocated a republic instead of a democracy because they thought slaves, women, and non-land owners were too stupid and not invested enough to be allowed to vote.
I see you have been properly indoctrinated by one of the progressive schools. Your argument makes no sense with regards to the form of government, since they *still* could have formed a democracy, just set land-owning white men as the only voters. A Republic means that *every person* is sovereign. It means that the plurality, or the collective, or whatever you call it *cannot* impose its will on individuals, because individuals are sovereign, and their rights are *inherent*, not granted by the state, as you would like it to be.
Furthermore, I looked up the quote. Did you read the rest of that paragraph?
"The Americans, on the other hand, are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state." --Alex de Tocqueville
How did you end up believing the exact opposite of what that quote actually meant?
You have missed an important part of the quote: the "willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property" part. It's an important distinction. You seem to think that congress spending other people's money that they confiscate at gunpoint somehow as generosity or compassion. That, however, is corrupt self-interest rather than the "self-interest rightly understood" that motivates people to help their neighbor. Take a look at New Orleans today. Compare the federal programs involved in repair and renovation to the Habitat for Humanity (kudos to Carter for his involvement there, BTW) and other private programs. Which ones are working?
Just how did you get such a twisted viewpoint of reality?
I actually already know. Through propaganda,
Ah, of course. Your state-run education and the drooling-over-socialism mainstream media.
They have convinced low income midwesterners that cutting the taxes for the rich will somehow result in a better economy for them.
Sigh. You're like a parrot. It's really about what drives the economy. Is it government confiscating money from private citizens to spend it on a $40 billion program that benefits a few, or is it people deciding for themselves how to invest their money? History is pretty clear that government is wasteful, corrupting, fraught with inefficiency, and produces absolutely $0 in new wealth.
As far as your hatred of Carter, that's a pretty standard parroting. I'd be interested if you could name any specific policies that you believe led to the economic conditions of that era.
First, presidents don't really have a lot of impact on the economy. They can either interfere (FDR) or get out of the way (Reagan). This can have some impact, but none have had the kind of impact that FDR's ruinous policies did.
Still, Carter's policies were horrible:
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You forgot: changed the banking rules that to allow direct investment in real estate which created a bubble on property values that played a big role in the S&A collapses as well as the farms being forced to sell out.
I think that's important because it had one of the largest impacts and effected the most people's lives. It drove property values out of the reach of most people while the economy was collapsing around them. It was perhaps worse then it is today- at
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I see. A whole website set up to shout "liberals are commies" gets a +5, Interesting, and a reply pointing that out gets a -1, Flamebait.
So much for the theory that Slashdot is a haven for said commie liberals, huh?
Here's an idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Here's an idea... (Score:5, Funny)
> How about stimulating jobs that actually produce something that others might want?
Fool! You've got it all wrong! I refer you to Iowahawk's Memo to America's Irresponsible Tea Party Whiners: STFU [typepad.com]. A sample:
See how it works? Now, go pay more taxes!
Re:Here's an idea... (Score:4, Informative)
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the Jenny Craig stimulus!
Well, I heard Obama was all for trimming the pork !
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Is it too soon for .... (Score:2)
"Router to nowhere" jokes? or should that be "Layer 3 switch to nowhere" I can't decide, but in view of the Psion news, we should remember that "bridge to nowhere" has already been taken.
BTW: Anyone know where to _BUY_ a Psion Netbook?
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Regardless it's still a Layer 8 problem.
What needs funding? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm curious to know what critical cyber security projects or activities are "shovel ready" and awaiting funding...
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I'm curious to know what critical cyber security projects or activities are "shovel ready" and awaiting funding...
Hopefully, "shovel-ready" means those projects are ready to be dead and buried, for a change.
The mission, the people... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5105027.ece [timesonline.co.uk]
So, he knows what he's up against. If you run any sort of port knocker or ssh logging at a target IP range, you know that near round the clock brute forcing is going on by Chinese networks. They now are distributing the problem into botnets to prevent being blackholed, but they continue at it.
Obama has Janet Napolitano to run this group. They will work with US-CERT, but their mandate should be defense, not offense. They could start by approaching the US Tier-1 providers and saying, in essence, we want to use tools from companies like Arbor Networks and others that track botnets to isolate better signatures and reject them at the national perimeter, sort of an IDP at the edge of major networks.
The NSA probably has access to all domestic US websites encryption keys, at least the ones that come from Verisign. So, inspect all encrypted traffic headed back to Chinese networks, on any port. If you can't decrypt it, consider it hostile. Shunt it.
I may get modded down as flamebait, probably by Chinese slashdot readers - but the fact is, we are at war with the Chinese.
Re:The mission, the people... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, there's this huge body of technologically-inclined people in China and India... oh wait...
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Problem with education is that it isn't really the system's fault. Since the Apollo program ended in the 70s it hasn't been "cool" to try to do well in school, be motivated towards science and math, etc. The education system has for the most part recognized this and is trying to stay relevent to the current generation. Too bad, really.
You see, in their striving for "relevence" they pretty much accepted the idea that the education system is a waste of time for most of the people in it. OK, not every chil
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i suggest separating the smart kids from the not so smart. The jocks can bully each other, the vapid cheerleaders can be catty and leave the kids with potential to learn w/o fear. i might have earned better grades if i hadn't been avoiding being called a nerd. Germany does this and it works pretty well. i'd be in favor of such a system esp. if it understood the difference between smart and gets-good-grades/likes-doing-homework.
America IS ardently anti-intellectual, and we're anti-anyone-doing-better-or-
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Well, we can't have an educated populace. After all:
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And we're definitely not just throwing money down a black hole: among other things, this sort of project could easily lead to some improvements to SELinux.
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...which just goes to show you exactly why horrible ideas like bailouts & stimulus can survive. "Well, as long as I might get a slice..."
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But it's not just me getting a slice, it's the collective knowledge of the open source community and anyone else who wants it. It's turning deficit spending into tangible benefits, which is at least as useful as turning deficit spending into CEO bonuses.
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Oh I agree with you there - I wasn't trying to paint you as a selfish bastard or anything =) It's just not the place of government to fund things like that, and it's made even more onerous for being deficit spending. It may have a greater benefit to the collective knowledge than giving CEO bonuses, but there is still a net loss even if it's hidden behind taxes, debt, and/or inflation.
The evaporation of knoweldge (Score:2)
Obama's campaign was approached in the fall of 2008 by the NSA, to let him and Axelrod know that either the Chinese or the Russians hacked his campaign systems.
I'm not affiliated with any such group, but I did drop by campaign offices in the early part of the summer. I commented to three very separate people on the weaknesses I saw and that the systems would get cracked and approximately when (+/- 1 week). I contacted two of them after the breaches made the news. So far not even one has responded to my finely worded Told You So, accompanied by links to the news articles.
Just to pick a random vulnerability, the staffers did not appear to have Samba [webdav.org] or even We [webdav.org]
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It's been YOUR journalists who reported that the US Government knows the Chinese have an action plan. In the article published in the UK Times
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2409865.ece [timesonline.co.uk]
they go into the details that the Chinese have an action plan to cyberattack a US naval fleet systems.
Thank god you chaps still have a free press over there, and I thank my stars for the Guardian every day.
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The government has the ability to perform warrantless wiretapping and they use voice recognition software on the entirety of every major US carrier's cellphone network. Don't be naive.
A control channel is a control channel. The Chinese are looking to place rootkits in powerplants, water treatment facilities, etc. These places don't have the sophistication necessary to IDP their systems against well constructed keys
PC? (Score:2, Interesting)
No-one's mentioned the Chinese governments vast expenditure on active (read - aggressive) cybersecurity - is it not PC anymore to say this?
I'm in London UK & all for your US nerds defending our cyber frontiers 'cos we certainly can't! BO rocks!
Re:PC? (Score:4, Insightful)
BO rocks!
Actually, America has a BO problem at the moment. Don't be fooled. Adding a lump of sugar to the poison doesn't make any less poisonous.
FYI, GW did this as well. Every president is going to do some things right, and a lot of them wrong.
Never forget, the goal of the presidents since the USA were founded has been to expand their own power. BHO will be no different in this respect.
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Right now we don't have a BO problem. We have an economy that is failing. You may have an opinion on a solution that differs from BO. But it is hard to know if what he is doing is wrong or right since economic policy is extremely complex even f
Does a Database guru have a chance? (Score:2)
I am a Database guru. Yes, I know myself and have worked on countless DB systems mostly on the west coast.
Question is: While I know I have a shot at this do I have a chance to be considered for one of these cyber security jobs? I would not mind even if I am on the not so fancy team.
I am kind of tired of the same-old, same-old routine.
Re:Does a Database guru have a chance? (Score:4, Funny)
Well your a step ahead of me. I'm still waiting to meet myself.
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Plenty of jobs for DBAs with a security clearance all along the west coast.
As for getting the security clearance that is the problem, if you cannot find a job in your local market that will hire people who are just eligible for clearance then there is not much chance of getting one.
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I'd say yes - in my experience folks don't enter the infosec industry trained as a security engineer. Or at least up to this point, that's rare. Instead, most security teams (including the one I work on) are built with sysadmins, network engineers, code monkeys, web developers and dba's (and a few blackhat script kiddies) that have a particular passion for defending data, networks and endpoints.
Unfortunately, with this decade's increased focus on security I fear we'll soon have a glut of paper CISSP's that
Weak Postulate (Score:4, Insightful)
As an AC no one will ever see this comment, but I have to say it anyway.
The summary: "As his administration continues to work on an stimulus plan that can save America's economy.." makes it sound as if this is an accepted postulate, but nothing could be further from the truth. Many economists (and others) have serious doubts that such a stimulus package can "save" anything. And while economics is anything but intuitive, one does wonder how borrowing a trillion or so dollars -- at interest -- will work towards putting the economy "back on track."
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The same way every other loan works.
By spending on capital now, you can leverage your potential to pay it back plus pocket profit in the future.
What is with the right wing of our population suddenly becoming stupid to basic business management?
"A loan just has to be payed back in the future it's useless."
"A deficit is just an equal tax on the future and in the long term is nothing but damaging to the economy."
"The government borrowing is just putting off the inevitable."
The economy will inevitably bounce ba
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The idea is that we have underutilized resources that need to be employed in order to maximize our current capacity.
What if we have too much capacity right now? Perhaps that capacity should be eradicated. Do we need as many car companies, financial firms, etc. as we do now? Only the market knows. Perhaps the stimulus will only maintain corporations that should downsize or go out of business.
It's like my college loan. I couldn't afford college so I took out a loan. Then once I used my college education t
Jobs shipped overseas (Score:5, Insightful)
The money will go to $5.00/hr bidders on RentACoder. There's no incentive in this bill to keep the money in the US
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How about a bit less cheerleading? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example: "stimulus plan that can save America's economy"
"can"? That remains to be seen, and many say it will not. Try being less of a cheerleader and tell the truth. "may save" is a better selection, and much closer to the truth, given several hundred prominent economists (and the CBO) have said this "stimulus" may end up hurting the economy due to the wasteful "political repayment" spending and huge debt load it contains.
Per the CBO a recovery, albeit slow, is predicted for later this year even were no "stimulus" package passed.
Go read up on the Nixon-Ford-Carter economy that used similar big-government Keynesian methods to stimulate the economy, and ended up producing "stagflation", high interest rates, high unemployment and high inflation (the latter two both in double digits).
Then go read Hazlitt and Hayek for why this Keynesian stuff doesn't work as intended.
In engineering terms, most learned this lesson in statics and dynamics class: You cannot push a rope.
cyber? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not "cyber"security at all! Cybersecurity would be pushing for signed DNS architecture, IPv6, and a DDoS mitigation infrastructure. Sonar and radar systems are physical security, not cyber security.
DHS? WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why DHS? Talk about throwing money into a trash disposal.
Why not NSA/CSS? They are already tasked with this and have budget. Plus they have produced viable useful solutions, SE-Linux for example. And they have competence, unlike the DHS, who seem more concerned with political correctness than securing the nation and the borders.
This smells of political back-scratching, not a solution to a problem.
Secondly how is this supposed to stimulate demand in the economy? Remember, that was the purpose of the huge debt load we just got saddled with.
Watch for crony-contracts, and the money to not produce anything other than rich politically connected friends.
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Bush did this to the Coast Guard. He gave DHS the money, shorted their budget, and then DHS made them an offer they can't refuse. I'll be interested to see if the NSA gets fully funded.
If not, DHS will task the NSA, eventually. That's where all the brains are. If that's what's happening, this is Big Brother coming, fellas. Obama's starting to make me nervous, by supporting this monocultured, centralized structure. I want DHS disbanded and dismantled.
But then again, Tolkien warned us what power does. As Fran
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But then again, Tolkien warned us what power does.
Enlighten us. How did Tolkien warn us about power?
I think a fitting quote, from John Dalberg, Baron of Acton: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."
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Huge debt we "just got saddled with"? You haven't been paying attention much for oh, say the last 30 years. [zfacts.com]
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Congress just bumped it up by almost double, in one month, what it took Bush 8 years to do, which was bad enough.
And they did fiscally what Bush and Congress did with the Patriot Act - created a crisis atmosphere and rammed a bill through without proper scrutiny.
Both were wrong.
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Fyi - I said "debt load" not debt - you severely misquoted me, There is a difference. The former is what was added (the debt load contained in the spending bill), the latter is the sum total.
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This smells of political back-scratching, not a solution to a problem.
That smell...that's the smell of shit. And napalm burning. Oh dear...is our country on fire? I say...we better go smother it with these exceedingly flammable dollars!
so obama did in 30 days what it took dubya three years to do and we're still hearing more about what michelle is wearing on any particular day than where the stimulus money is going. it's going to be a fun next 10 years or more...
Took W a little more than 3 years to blow $2x10^12. He got started with eroding civil liberties about a year in, though.
$335 million?? (Score:2)
That's enough for TENS of jobs, or even twice that if they invest in tech school graduates instead of so-called 'experts'!
Wa wa wee wa!!
Intrusion Detection Systems (Score:2, Informative)
EasyIDS: http://sourceforge.net/projects/easyids/ [sourceforge.net]
Stratag
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Some people with network connections do not bother running an IDS, as it is easily bypassed, and often offers little value added. Additionally, if one were to have an IDS, what good would it do you unless you are actually watching it, and tuning it? The staffing required for something like this on a national scale would be prohibitive.
We also have to consider that to monitor all of the traffic with an IDS, you must have access to all of the traffic. Although we believe this is already occurring, you can be
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Perhaps because IDS is almost worthless? The days of single-packet exploits seem to be nearly at an end. The only really worthwhile detection method we are seeing today is digging through network and application logs, checking them against blacklist, grep -v'ing away known-good stuff, and looking for unusual stuff. This means a really, intelligent human is required, not a bunch of Snort signatures looking for packet attacks which haven't been used since 1997.
DHS? (Score:2)
Wow, with $325 million (Score:2)
That'll be a _really_ secure version of SELinux.
Can it really be saved? (Score:2)
The economy that is. Or rather, should it be saved? If it means we still have ridiculous copyright and patent laws on the books? Government granted monopoly of what should be public infrastructure (cable/data/phone lines)? No real barrier for lobbyists to buy off our politicians?
Our economy woes are entirely thanks to big business and lazy, greedy politicians. What exactly do they want to "save"? They legislated and lobbied their way into a system that benefited them at the expense of true progress and the
How about a free anti-virus? (Score:2)
Granted, it would have to be open-source so that we'd know that the gov't wasn't using it to snoop on us. But, unlike a typical open-source project, the gov't would pay a team to continually update the virus definitions and the source code.
Now, I realize that there already are free anti-virus products out there, and some of them score very
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I, dunno what u talkin bout G.
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Well, thanks, BadAnalogyGuy, for demonstrating exactly what's wrong with mainstream macroeconomic thought these days.
In case anyone didn't understand all that, he's referring to the infamous "GDP equation" that "gross domestic product", a poor attempt at capturing the total value of goods and services produced in an economy each year, is equal to:
Consumption (C) + Investment (I) + Government purchases (G) + net imports (X - M)
I don't know what he's using to mean Y, but I think he's referring to the rewrite
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Co-ops are largely untaxable. Why would we want to record that sort of financial exchange? ;)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know anything about how cost effective the Hoover Dam or various bridges and public works projects have been in the past, but assuming that they _were_ cost effective, these are examples where "Creating Jobs" is a good thing that stimulates the economy in a good way, because it not only gives people money to spend, but it adds overall value to the system. The Hoover Dam added irrigation, water supply, and power, while bridges add lower transportation costs.
On the other hand, paying someone to sit like a night watchmen on P2P Networks or paying someone to replace the White House Carpet or repaint the ceilings doesn't really help anyone because nothing of value is being created. You're just shuffling money around, and its really no different economy-wise than just _giving away_ the money. People are going to spend it either way.
This isn't to say I don't support re-carpeting or re-painting the White House if it needs it, I am merely saying that the catch-phrase "creating jobs" doesn't do the system any good unless the jobs are worth doing.
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Excellent post!
There is no long term benefit to 'creating jobs' that are not able to be self-sustaining(or readily transferable to another project) in a reasonable time frame.
As you said:
I know I don't have all of the answers, but some specifics are not too difficult to grasp.
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There were many jobs created during the WPA era that don't make sense at first glance. But they saved America money. People without money don't lay down and die. They may grab a gun or grab a purse. Jails cost money. Hospitals cost money as well when the public health suffers because individuals suffer health declines from lack of medical care, nutrition or housing.
Considering only the tax payers money it may be the best of all plans to find some task
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Confidence can be gained in other ways too. Having an unemployment insurance program and maybe a rental or mortgage assistance program can create confidence.
Take Japan for instance, they recently went through an economic crisis. The first wave, Japan hired every unemployed person capable and willing to work to do nothing but dig ditches and fill them back in. The economy rebounded and as soon as half of those people went back to regular jobs, the economy collapsed again, this time much worse. Japan changed
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Why is everyone believing that "creating" a bunch of temporary jobs is good?
They are just throwing money around with hopes that it will do something. It wont. If it creates 30,000 jobs that last for 1 year it's simply going to cause a secondary aftershock in the economy.
Spend the money to create permanent real solutions instead of this, "OMG!OMG! hurry spend money! HURRY!" thing they are doing now
I personally wished they would have not even voted on the damn thing until May and took the time to make
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Plus the Republicans are as bad as the Dems on this, both sides have thrown in bullshit riders on the bill to turn it into a money-grab for pet interests.
Only 3 RINO Republicans in the entire congress voted for this. Not a single house Republican had anything to do with it. The house minority leader [youtube.com] threw the bill and criticized the congress for not having even taken the time to read the damn thing.
This bill is as partisan as it gets. The Republicans had practically nothing to do with this mess, and opposed it every step of the way. You can't sit back and say that the Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats, when only three even voted for it.
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Aside from, you know, creating it.
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The Republicans mandated that the GSEs make bad loans so poor minorities could end up in houses they couldn't afford?
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The government is a very inefficient way to create jobs and most jobs it creates are temporary at best. At worst they can create an artifical job market that when the projects are completed, leads to higher unemployment as people are now trained for jobs that no longer exist.
Buying your way out of a recession, as many, if not most, ecomomist have come forward and said, at best leads to a temporary bump but will more than likely lead to an extended downturn in the economy. Spending like a drunken sailor on
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Um, so do you REALLY think that Obama and ilk DON'T KNOW THAT???
Of course they know that. What better way to solidify power and wealth that to continue the problem? The stimulus bill was the perfect way to embed cool stuff like Electronic Medical Records (which was the real goal) the enable more government. Not to mention gaining 36% of Citibank.
Problem is this however, IF you let the economic pain go on too long, people are liable to start screaming for your beheading on public TV. Ukraine today is on
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And as for Keynesian economic theory. It was Keynes himself who suggested that Hoover's tax increases (much the same as Obama's proposed corporate and income tax increase) actually signifigantly lengthened the depression.
Of course taxes increased the length of the depression, because taxes cause deflation by taking money out of the supply.
However, simply cutting taxes would not have fixed the depression.
The problem was a lack of credit and liquidity in order to make people do something with their money. If
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I would like to add...
"Capitalism is a polite way of getting people to do things voluntarily without forcing them."
Without the "getting to do things" part, then capitalism is a big as failure as communism.
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I never said they've never made anything but temperory jobs but jobs created under this type of make-work bill are almost by definition temporary. Either that or the government grows to a point of unsustainability (which it pretty much already has).
Anyone with an iota of common sense, thus excluding you apparently, would understand that since the government essentially only creates income through taxation, it cannot create a sustainable system in which the only people it's taxing are in fact it's own emplo
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As with yesterday's story [slashdot.org] we now begin to see the reality of the 'stimulus bill' - endless pork, pandering to special interests, and earmarks.
Ironically, I prefer the smell of real swine to this shit. Pig shit I can stand. Political shit is just nasty.