Economy May Already Be Beyond Saving

This week should be the last week of discussing and debating in the house and senate over the economic stimulus bill. The final amount will probably come in at just under 800 billion dollars in total. It will likely be about 790 billion or so if some republicans stop insisting that more of the aid package be cut in order to get them to vote for it to pass. The trouble with this whole idea may be simply that even if the package were 1 trillion dollars it may not be enough. The entire U.S. economy is worth about 15 trillion dollars and some economists have estimated that the damage that has been done to it in the last 5 months totals something more like 2-3 trillion and growing and that 790 billion is just not going to pack enough of a punch to move things in the right direction. Last week Vice President Biden was quoted as saying that the stimulus package has about a 30% chance of failing and ending up accomplishing nothing. Most economists would put that percentage much higher. It would be something like a boxer throwing a punch at an opponent but not having enough power on the punch to effect him and as a result not getting the desired result of laying his opponent incapacitated. Most economists are saying that 790 billion dollars will not be enough of a punch to do any good in an economy the size of that of the U.S.
In the meantime a total of about 3 million Americans have lost their jobs in just the last 6 months which is a pace that has not been experienced before in the nation's history and that rate of loss is increasing with almost 600,000 of those lost just in the month of January of this year.