Stimulus

Is the stimulus helping you? Thanks, CNN. Jeez.

An interesting take on the stimulus.

In the end, the stimulus is damned with high expectations. In the activist community, change is allowed to come one person at a time. One life changed for the better is enough to consider a nonprofit a success. Moral victories count in that world.

The stimulus is essentially doing an activist's job—changing lives and trying to make the country a better place. But it doesn't have the luxury of counting those moral victories. Its progress is judged on results, and those results better be big and clear to see, even when you zoom all the way out to look at the nation as a whole. It doesn't matter whether the stimulus has changed one life, only whether it has changed the country's. If you asked me more about that, I'd tell you that it's damn hard work.

The stimulus isn't helping me personally, but I certainly don't think that makes it a failure. My personal take is that one day I will make a good amount of money (is this a foolish thought?) and I'll end up paying a lot of it in taxes because of the stimulus, social security, the rising cost of healthcare, and a host of other government sponsored programs. In fact, even if I don't make decent money, I'll still end up paying a lot of taxes.

A way to evaluate or put the stimulus in terms I can understand...film. Say as a form of stimulus, the government decided to invest in film. Why not? The government invests in the farm and automobile industries all the time. Why not entertainment? Clearly, the government can create jobs merely by investing in film. All those on the productions would be paid and have jobs. It would be good. But would it be sustainable? I doubt it. I can imagine government working a lot like the 546 faculty at USC - picking projects by a mishmash of ideology, personal taste and biases, group-think, group-politics, perceived quality of individual projects, perceived level of talent, etc. The result would be a once in awhile good film that is more the exception than the rule. It might start a few worthwhile careers. Eisenstein and the famous Soviet filmmakers and theorists were funded by their government. A government sponsored film stimulus would have a different set of values and make different choices than a market driven Hollywood model. Which do I prefer? Well, I think that should be obvious.