US needs more gov't spending, says Google boss
The private sector won't save the US economy anytime soon; the government "needs to do something now."
US needs more gov't spending, says Google boss
Joseph N. DiStefano
“Where is the demand going to come today if it’s not from some form of government action?” asks Google Inc. chairman Eric Schmidt in this Bloomberg story. “The government has big levers that it can apply. But it needs to do it in the short term.”
“The federal government can spend as much money as it wants because we borrow in our own currency,” said Schmidt, who now heads Google's board as CEO Larry Page leads day-to-day operations.
Don't expect China, India, Brazil and other growing countries to save the world economy; they're not going to buy a lot more of our stuff, Schmidt warned: “We already have one of the cheapest currencies we ever had and yet we still cannot export ourselves out of this recession." Yields on 10-year US government notes are below 2%, half the five-year average.
“All of the economists that I know agree that in a situation where there is a strong possibility of a very long- term recession, or at least a structural growth recession, which many people think we’re in, you need to do something now,” Schmidt said. Without government spending, the private sector won't likely create a lot more new jobs "for a very long time." In recent months modest US private-sector job growth has been nearly cancelled by layoffs, including teachers and other local and state government workers. “Economic growth comes from the private sector with government assistance,” including grants to states. "The states are restricted to actually having balanced budgets and with revenues going up and down, it’s extraordinary hardship at the state level and that contributes to the economic decline,” Schmidt said. “A simple thing to do would be block grants to the states to help them through this.”
Obama is pushing a $447 billion package of payroll tax breaks, road projects and other attempts to boost spending and hiring.
Schmidt, a computer-science PhD who helped develpo the Java programming language while at Sun Microsystems, echoed calls by Dow Chemical boss Andrew Liveris and other backers of a national industrial policy when he told Bloomberg we need "national agreement on what it means to be competitive. It galls me that other countries are growing so much more quickly than we are because they are investing in the productive parts of their society and they’ve chosen to or don’t have some of the systems that we have that are not very productive... We have to have that conversation.” -- The US, specifically the anti-monopoly cops at the Justice Department, are deep in Google's business, writes Blue Bell native Evan Britton, boss of California-based ResourceWebs, in this Business Insider article. US block of planned Google-Yahoo merger made possible Microsoft's Bing, which with other Microsoft efforts now controls as much as one-third of the online ad market otherwise dominated by Google, Britton writes. But Google heavily dominates Web publishing - and will continue to do so - unless Obama's (or his successor's) Justice Department intervenes, Britton concludes.
Eric Schmidt may be a computer genius but from what he said during this interview he doesn't know jack ... about the economy. Government will NEVER spend us out of a recession. Plus, they have tried it twice in the last 4 years and it hasn't worked yet.— hopster
Comment removed.- and he's totally right. Infrastructure.— gorming
- How can Google be run by such a blithering idiot?— LibertyNow
- "intelligent person" — gorming
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- LibertyNow wrote-"How can Google be run by such a blithering idiot?"
See everyone who doesn't subscribe to the Tea Party agenda is an idiot... even if they run a successful company like Google. Obviously, LibertyNow is a billionaire tycoon and not a troll.— hockeyfan00 - likely. We DO need more spending. — gorming
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- ever think that maybe its you thats the idiot? and not the genius?— Ryan
- Government spending and mismanagement is what got us INTO this mess. It is hardly the solution. You do realize this country is in debt to the tune of $14.7 trillion don't you. When you add in unfunded liabilities its more like $70 trillion. Yeah we should just print more money out of thin air to spend more. Its laughingly stupid. NEVER, as in NOT EVEN ONCE, in the history of the planet, has a nation been able to spend its way out of a recession.— LibertyNow
- Why not listen to folks like Peter Schiff, Tom Woods, Bill Bonner who predicted this mess with pinpoint accuracy long before it started. Instead you drones go to the people responsible for the recession, the ones who laughed at anyone who correctly pointed out exactly where we were headed, for the solutions. Yes I am a genius. But its not that hard to understand. Really.— LibertyNow
- I think what we need is smart spending,— Coconut
- I thought Al invented Java as well as Internet.— Coconut
So the ceo of starbucks, and the ceo of Google, both arguably the biggest American corporate success stories in the last decade - and get this, they are real life, in the flesh "job creators" - are actually speaking out about the recession and job creation and , in essence, declaring that the republicans don't have a clue.
I'd like to see a businessman stand up and indicate that the republicans are right. Anyone? Who are the CEO's that Boehner and Cantor and company so adamantly care for? Can anyone cite them?
- Jeffrey Immelt from GE, the Obama Job Czar, wants more government spending. Know why? About 2 cents of every dollar that the United States spends with GE goes directly into Jeffrey's pocket.— Mr. Smith
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- Its funny, and blatantly hypocritical, that a lot from the left agree with CEOs when those CEOs agree with the liberal hive mind. Any other time, CEOs are evil. Obama already invested billions into infrastructure. Doesn't seem to be working really well, does it? To fix things we need to make the middle class feel secure in our jobs and then give us the stimulus money. No matter what we do with it, short of stuffing it in a mattress, we will be creating demand for goods and services. Once that demand is present (and sustained) and companies feel secure about their future, they will begin hiring.— psyrus
- These comments are a perfect indicator of where we are at in Congress. No facts, no objective truth, no analyzing historical precedence and no testimony by experts can persuade these Republicans/Tea Party types from changing their opinion. And this position seems to have some type of relevance to toughness. I’ve never seen people so uptight about their masculinity and need this external validation of the manliness. There’s no real debate in the scientific community regarding global warming. There’s no precedence of cutting government spending growing the economy out of a recession but there are examples of short term government spending being effective. And there is absolutely no doubt that Republican deregulation caused the recession. While there’s always been disagreement between the parties over policy, there’s never been this level of disagreement of what the facts are or what the truth is. The new Republican approach of attacking the facts is a disgrace and against long held American values. We're heading back into a recession and it is due to cuts in government spending by Republicans at the state and federal level and it is a coordinated strategy.— MikeP
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- It's no coincidence that Google execs give MILLIONS to Obama and the Democrat party... Now they are promoting more government spending (i.e. DEBT), which of course they will get a piece of, and give the Democrat party their taste. Google has become evil.— ObamaSolyndra
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