Well, me actually. The math, it is horrible.
However, I do have enough common sense to know that this is an incredibly ignorant analogy:
Oil does a lot of good things. It creates seals around engine parts, making your car more fuel efficient and powerful. It seals out air and prevents rust, and it also carries heat away from the engine. Anyone who doesn’t change the oil regularly and keep the proper level of oil is asking for a blown engine.
And that’s what Paul Krugman’s been talking about for four years now. The Bush administration, followed by the Obama administration, didn’t use enough stimulus oil and the engine of the economy has slowed to a crawl. (Hey pal, don’t you see that flashing red IDIOT LIGHT?)
What Susie Madrak of the hyper-leftist Crooks and Liars Blog doesn’t quite understand is that, to continue her analogy, Krugman and his minions are promoting the idea of filling the engine up with oil to the top of the oil filler neck.
It doesn’t take someone with a mechanical engineering degree to know what would happen if you were to do that.
But I guess that Susie isn’t even smart enough to figure that out.
Too much oil and the VW engine blows the seal, sprays it out, and it drops a valve.
Too much oil does exactly as DirtCrashr says.
What I find more interesting though is stimulus funds are not the equivalent of oil. It’s the equivalent of removing the oil filter and dumping sand into the oil filler. It will run for a short bit but eventually that sucker is gonna seize.
Taxes and government can be considered the parasitic effects that result in decreased engine performance. Currently I would say our engine is may 30% efficient and the way it’s being driven it’s being run into 0%. efficiency. Soon, no matter how hard that engine is running, the wheels of that car won’t turn.
This is a completely bullshit analogy.
It’s like claiming that a little sand is good for your engine, because air filters do not filter out all of the incoming grit.
The very notion that government spending is good for the economy is Keynesian bullshit.
ALL GOVERNMENT SPENDING IS BAD FOR THE ECONOMY.
We have to spend some tax money on stuff that the private sector can’t do well, like Defense, justice, some emergency services, and roads. We can’t avoid these costs. But they are still costs, all involving taking money from those who produce wealth permanently out of the economy.
A guy I work with showed his daughter how to “check” and add oil to her car’s engine. She called him a couple of weeks later to tell him her engine was not running “right”. He found that the connecting rod for the middle cylinder (Geo with three cylinder engine) was broke and there was a hole in the block — engine was still running on two cylinders. She “went though the motions”: pulled the dip stick, looked at it, and then added a quart of oil. Several times. Seems she totally missed the point of “looking” at the dip stick. Do that enough and things just don’t work right.
Susie Madrak might want to think about how that would relate to her analogy.
Wow. Just when you think you’ve seen the lowest level of dumb, somebody like this lady comes along. WTF planet do these people come from?
I thought we were supposed to do away with oil.
“For those four years, I’ve watched Krugman try to explain things reasonably,…”
Tell that to the guy from Estonia.