Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The Muted Stimulus Response

by anderson

There has been a general feeling, somewhat backed by anemic numbers, that the stimulus bill was not, nor is it now, performing quite as well as hoped.  Obama has taken hits for this, though we all know that there will be a lag between stimulus and response.  In the happy, trickling-down land of the GOP, money normally rains down on the poor, the wretched, the sick, from the lofty towers of the uber rich.  Because they live in a such a happy land, the GOP have been unable to muster the reserve and patience necessary to let the real world work. 

It appears, however, that we may be seeing more (or less) than just a phase shift between input and output.  There hasn't been much input, and only 25% of the stimulus money has been spent.  That, and the fact that the much of the money is being used, not to stimulate new projects, but simply to fill in budget gaps at the state and local levels.

Only $100 billion of the $787 billion stimulus package passed nine months ago has actually been spent by the federal government so far, with another $90 billion of stimulus coming in the form of tax reductions, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported Monday evening. That leaves three quarters of the package -- and its stimulative effects -- yet to come.

Slow as that pace may seem, it's in line with initial CBO estimates.

But much of the spending hasn't had the full impact it could, the report says, because "it appears that stimulus funds substituted for some spending from regular appropriations."



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