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Hernando Today

Saving County Tax Dollars

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Hernando Today

Published: March 11, 2009

Saving County Tax Dollars
I figure if the commissioners really wanted to save money, they could.
Here's a starter: They reduced monthly meetings from four to three. Shouldn't their pay be reduced 25 percent also? That should save about $60,000 a year.
Eugene Baus
Weeki Wache

If Obama Fails, America Will Collapse
Since you published Russ Colombo's carping letter about the President Barack Obama's economic stimulus bill, a number of things have happened: The Republican governors who threatened to refuse stimulus money have all decided to accept it after all (except for one, who was overridden by the state legislature.) Good thing, too. Let's face it, states like Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi need some economic stimulus even in the best of times.
The first $26 billion of the stimulus money has been released and is already creating construction jobs.
The Bureau of Labor statistics has released the February unemployment numbers.
The United States is in an economic emergency. For various reasons, it isn't likely that our situation will be as bad as the Great Depression, but it certainly has the potential to be as severe as the "Great Recession" of the Reagan era, when unemployment hit 11 percent.
On Feb. 27, the Bureau of Economic Analysis revealed real (inflation adjusted) GDP shrank at an annualized rate of 6.2 percent. If this contraction actually does go on for a year, unemployment will hit 10 percent by October. The Obama administration is doing its best to keep that from happening.The financial crisis has vaporized trillions of dollars of wealth, which was stored as housing valuation, stock values, banking assets, etc. The official unemployment rate (known as U-3) now stands at a seasonally adjusted 8.1 percent. But, unadjusted, the rate is 8.9 percent. A broader measure of unemployment, U-6, includes people who've given up hope of finding a job and people who are working part time because they can't find full time work. The U-6 unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted) is 16 percent.
Want more? The Congressional Budget Office estimates there will be a recessionary gap (the shortfall between full employment GDP and actual GDP) of $2.9 trillion over the next three years.
The commonly accepted theory is that recessions occur when consumer spending and private investment fall below the level needed to keep the economy at full employment. At that point, government must step in and inject money into the economy through deficit spending. Estimates of the spending needed to end this recession range from $1.2 trillion to $2.4 trillion over three years. The Obama stimulus package is not enough, by itself, to end the economic downturn. His hope, I'm sure, is he can slow the rise in unemployment and the downward spiral in consumer spending and investment.
Complaints about "pork" and rising deficits miss the point. To the economy, it doesn't much matter how the money is spent. It is the spending itself which creates jobs. Economists often refer to this type of program as "dropping money from helicopters."
The Reagan-era recession was caused by high oil prices and high interest rates. It ended when the Fed lowered interest rates. The Bush II recession is much more complicated and there is no obvious policy, except for massive deficit spending, to end it.
If the president's plan doesn't work, millions of people will lose their homes and unemployment will rise to Depression levels. Republican pundits have openly expressed their hope that President Obama will fail. To hope for Obama's failure is to hope for America's collapse.
Dallas Dunlap
Brooksville

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