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 Why the economy sucks |
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Sep 03, 2010 - 8:03 AM - by The Man
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It's late so this post will probably ramble some. Forgive me. I'll attempt to clean it up or at least clarify the unclear parts tomorrow.
There's a lot of arguing between the Austrian school and Keynesians right now about whether fiscal stimulus works. It requires quite a bit of data-fudging to pretend that the Great Depression wasn't alleviated by Roosevelt's policies (Amity Shlaes and her ilk focus on overall private employment, which is misleading since the New Deal wasn't designed to improve private farm employment but rather to make food prices affordable, a measure which directly contradicted the goal of improving overall private employment; however, if one focuses either on private nonfarm employment or overall employment including government employment, then employment improved by 10% from 1933 to 1937, when Roosevelt temporarily abandoned the New Deal to attempt to balance the budget - a remarkable improvement by any standard. GDP improved similarly). However, the Austrian vs. Keynesian debate misses a large part of the point entirely.
This isn't the same country it was in 1933. We had a solid manufacturing sector and a large trade surplus at the time, even if our economy was in the shit can. These days we've outsourced all our jobs. Paul Craig Roberts, an architect of Reaganomics, has in recent years joined the list of notable Republican strategists who have abandoned the party (another notable example is Kevin Phillips, an architect of Nixon's Southern Strategy and the author of The Emerging Republican Majority who became one of the sharpest critics of the... [Read More]
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Though there's a certain logic behind the idea, (Stop using cash, there's less cash to rob) I'm unconvinced that it really is going to work in practise.
