Consider this a companion piece to yesterday's post regarding the amnesia suffered by the New York Times editorial board regarding what it will take to recover from the Great Recession which was essentially a call for more Keynesian tomfoolery. It would appear that Times columnist Paul Krugman was the ghost writer for that piece as the following is the money paragraph from his latest column:
For example, we could have W.P.A.-type programs putting the unemployed to work doing useful things like repairing roads — which would also, by raising incomes, make it easier for households to pay down debt. We could have a serious program of mortgage modification, reducing the debts of troubled homeowners. We could try to get inflation back up to the 4 percent rate that prevailed during Ronald Reagan’s second term, which would help to reduce the real burden of debt.
Always cracks us up that progressives look back to the Great Depression as the good ol' days. Stands to reason, though, as dependency upon government programs was at an all-time high and is looked upon today as the panacea for all that ails us. Funny... we thought that $800 billion stimulus package passed in the initial stages of this administration and that is now conveniently slipping down the memory hole was supposed to kick-start the economy and keep unemployment under 8 percent.
And still with the mortgage modification programs. Taking your money to prop up bad risks hasn't been working out so hot lately as front page headlines in papers across the country will attest.
And who isn't up for paying more to put food on the table? What might be for economists like Krugman isn't going to cut it for working families dealing with real world issues and isn't going to make the reality of the debt burden magically disappear.
Again, it's as if the past 2 or 3 years never happened such is the manner of reasoning and logic currently being applied to this slump which is only entrenching us further and prolonging the agony.
What some would have us forget, others still have been paying attention.
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2 comments:
All those WPA programs and other efforts did squat to get us out of the depression. 1936 and 1937, well into Roosevelt's tenure, were horrible years for the U.S. economy.
Again with the roads! What is it with infrastructure and these guys? The roads are fine and the infrastructure is, too. In the 30s we spent far less on infrastructure than we do now. Putting people to work on it made sense because there was significant improvement to be had. That's just not the case any more. That problem has been solved by regular budgetary increases in maintenance improvement spending over the last 80 years. Give it a rest, guys!
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