I Sense a Pattern Here

Here is a chart I ran a while back on auto sales, showing how the cash for clunkers "stimulus" program simply spent a bunch of money to pull forward car sales by a month or two

Here are housing sales -- I don't have time this morning to annotate the chart but the housing stimulus program expired in May

5 Comments

  1. Sean:

    I stopped by today specifically today to see how long it would take for you to gloat over today's home sale numbers. About 4 hours.

  2. IgotBupkis:

    > I don’t have time this morning to annotate the chart but the housing stimulus program expired in May

    Unfortunately, the idiots in the admin are just going to use this to argue that their stimulus was stimulating.

  3. IgotBupkis:

    .

    > I stopped by today specifically today to see how long it would take for you to gloat over today’s home sale numbers. About 4 hours.

    Sean, there's a distinction between "gloating" and "I told you so". Duh.

    "...I don't feel very triumphant."
    "I know. Perhaps that's what Triumph really is: not so much glorying in
    the defeat of your enemies as weariness that they couldn't see what seemed
    so obvious to you."

    - Ben Bova, 'Escape Plus' -

    .

  4. Noumenon:

    Boo for charts cut off at the bottom.

  5. caseyboy:

    Underscores the lack of business/economic understanding that resides in the White House now. Yes you can stimulate action with targeted tax cuts. But you can also retard action with targeted tax increases like the one we face in 2011. Tax it and you'll get less of it. Not too long ago Kansas raised its sales tax 1% in order to increase revenue. Six months later they were surprised to learn that tax receipts were down???? How did that happen???? Amateurs in dangerous positions.