Trope a dope

Wingnuts, including many of the Republican caucus in Congress, will tell you that the stimulus can't possibly create any jobs. This nonsense has even appeared here in its most pure and stupid form:

No a stimulus will fail because it does nothing to stimulate the economy. Every dollar the government spends is a dollar taken away from a private citizen that could have used it to pay down debt, fund college education, save for retirement, or invest in a new business.

Here's what this means: No debt can ever benefit the economy. Never mind that private businesses take debt and turn it into economic activity every day. And it's not a zero sum. But to these anti-government dopes, the government is different. Private money is homeopathic. One drop of it, diluted until every goddamn original molecule of a dollar is gone, is still more powerful than full-strength government money. It's nonsense.

And mroberts says that this is "common sense." That's what people call their beliefs when they can't muster any rational defense of their bullshit claims.

The point of stimulus is that borrowed money can stop a downward spiral that feeds on itself and overshoots in the same way the previous bubble overshot.