President Obama has been pushing hard for his proposed $825 billion stimulus package, which has been passed in the House and is now working its way in the Senate. In all the debate over whether it will work or not, little attention has been paid to the actual historical magnitude of this spending program.
The table, above, lists the 20 nations with the largest Gross Domestic Products (GDP) in the world. If the planned stimulus package were thought of as a separate country, its size would make it the 15th largest economy in the world, ranked just below Mexico and above Australia...
From any number of perspectives, what the president and the Congress are planning to implement represents one of the most massive experiments in “activist” government policy ever undertaken outside of war.
The "stimulus" package being weaved together by Obama and the Congress will be a giant, costly -- and in reality wasteful and counter-productive -- exercise in the absurd idea that government can manage the economy and produce the Keynesian "miracle" of turning "Stones into Bread" (as Ludwig von Mises called it many years ago).
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