Teddy at It's Still The Economy, Stupid gives his opinion on what it will take to jumpstart the economy:

Here's what we should look for in a real economic recovery. First, consumers need to have fixed their overspending ways from the previous boom. In every recession in the 20th century, consumers have cut their ratio of debt to disposable personal income. This gave them a reservoir of money to increase spending when the Fed reduced interest rates. In this recession, consumer's debt to disposable income actually increased, so the wherewithal of consumers to abruptly increase spending is much smaller, if any. Even a fixation on monthly payments rather than debt levels can't camouflage that even monthly debt service is higher now than before the recession.

Secondly, businesses need to increase profits, and do so through increasing sales. Increasing profits by cutting costs is not stimulating the economy any more than consumers cutting spending would stimulate the economy. Sales growth in this quarter's earnings reports continues to be anemic and as I referred to earlier is much worse after the weaker dollar had been factored out.

Thirdly, the increase in sales and profits leads to higher employment. There has never been a recovery where total employment didn't surpass it's previous peak. Today, we're not even close. More than 2.5 million jobs need to be created to get to the level of February 2001, and at the rate they've been created over the past year, mathematically that will never happen. Even generating jobs at the rate of a strong economy, we would need ten months just to get back where were nearly three years ago.

Finally, the increase in employment leads to even more consumption growth. Again, we're not even close. Growth in personal consumption expenditures, year-over-year, has improved to 2.8%, but this is still below the 3% level for most of 2002, and nowhere near the improvement from 1991 to 1993, when consumption growth climbed from negative territory to over 4% a year.

Is it just me, or are too may opinionated "experts" on economics missing some of the obvious points?

We've hardly begun to see the effects of Bush's economic stimulus, aka tax cuts, on the public's financial situation. Interest rates are in the blocks and will soon be making a dash upward in response to the Fed's need to borrow. The consequences will be the usual economic-choking kind: business contraction due to higher borrowing costs, death blow to the real estate (higher mortgage rates) and new car markets, higher cost for credit (credit cards, personal loans, student loans, SBA loans, etc.). And then the ultimate effect will be (after bankrupcies, defaults, layoffs, mergers, increased crime, and so on) the rise of inflation and it's affect on those living on fixed incomes. About the only positive thing will be the interest rate on my CD will go up.