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NumenLumen wrote:

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If temporary, where is the plan to re-privatize the car companies, AIG, Fanny & Freddy?  What is the plan to sunset TARP?  These are being maintained as governmental levers to meddle in the private economy far beyond the usual governmental role of taxation and regulation.

Re:  car companies.  This was reported just this week: 

General Motors Co.'s CEO said Tuesday that the automaker has repaid the $8.1 billion in loans it received from the U.S. and Canadian governments, a sign that a plan to rebuild the company is working...The U.S. government payments, made Tuesday, came five years ahead of schedule, and GM CEO Ed Whitacre said they are a sign that the automaker is on its way toward reducing government ownership of the company. The payments on the Canadian loans were also made Tuesday. GM still owes $45.3 billion to the U.S. and $8.1 billion to Canada, money it received in exchange for large stakes in the company. The U.S. government now owns 61 percent of the company and Canada owns roughly 12 percent. GM plans to repay both with a public stock offering, perhaps later this year.

The banks are paying off their TARP loans; in fact, most of the big banks paid up months ago, with the government turning a nice little profit.   Even at AIG projected losses have been cut from $100 billion to $48 billion, and there are some in the government who think that may approach $0 eventually. The notion that the government is trying to hold onto these companies is belied by the facts.

Is the health care bureaucracy or the nationalization of student loans meant to be temporary?  Maybe the first is if it is replaced with the ultimate goal of single-payer.  Or, it will be if Republican's fondest hopes are realized, but not because it is intended.

For crying out loud, lol!  First off, the health care bureaucracy already exists; it's called Aetna, WellPoint...  The health reform bill that was recently passed leaves those private companies in place for the forseeable future.  Indeed, if anything this act forestalls any pressure for a single-payer system for decades to come.  Second, "nationalizing" student loans takes us back to the Socialist Era of Dwight D. Eisenhower.  (You may not be old enough to remember that it was under Ike that the federal government started making loans directly to students, but as one of the borrowers I do.  It was that right-winger LBJ who privatized student loans.)

As to the stimulus (and you parrot Krugman very nicely, here), it was an unfocused, not-actually-stimulative morass that was as unfocused as Obama is.  It fits the MO that has been in place:  declare a crisis, throw a lot of crap that you've been waiting to pass (don't let the crisis go to waste....) at it, and declare it solved.  It's exactly how Sarbanes-Oxley was put together (that really did a bang-up job in preventing market turmoil), and has been the hallmark of everything that has come through this administration/congress.  

Here's a graph from the BEA showing the change in GDP by quarter. Please note when the direction changes from downward to upward during the recent recession:




Hmmm...it seems to happen in the second quarter of 2009, right after the stimulus spending started.  How can this be?  You just said it didn't work.  (I agree, though, that it was not as well-designed as it should have been and it was about 1/3 smaller than it should have been; the latter was the result of foolish attempts to get at least one Republican vote in the Senate.)

As to it's size and effectiveness- please cite a single case anywhere in history where unfocused governmental deficit spending released into an economy has actually led to real long-term growth.  The U.S. experience in the depression and Japan's lost decade simply argue otherwise.  Shotgun-approach stimulus programs are simply like sugar water for an economy, because they tend to not stimulate the ability of the private economy to grow on a sustained basis- which is what is needed (believe or not) for real economic recovery.

You are wrong about US experience in the Depression.  On the contrary, the government stimulus reduced private-sector unemployment from 25 percent to 17 percent, and moved GDP up.  The problem came when FDR allowed himself to be talked into putting on the brakes in 1937, resulting in a recession within the Depression. The next year they returned to stimulus, and growth was back.  Sorry, but that's the history.

As I said, I don't think Obama is a real socialist.  I think he is simply an out-of-his-depth academic-type liberal's liberal with little real understanding of how an economy actually operates.

He's not a liberal's liberal.  As a genuine, down to the bone liberal I can assure you of that!