Not Good Enough
Lambert has a YouTube video of Loudon Wainwright III singing his song, The Krugman Blues, which is a fitting lead in to Krugman’s latest column, That ’30s Show.
The White House didn’t do enough to even slow the slide, much less start the recovery. Along with the job losses wages are heading toward deflation, so you have fewer people working, and those that are working are taking home less money. That is not the way you get out of a recession, much less the GOPression we are in.
The private sector is not even borrowing, much less spending or investing, so it is up to the government. The budget problems of the states are making matters much worse as they are required to lay people off and curtail their spending to balance their budgets.
We need a really big stimulus package and we need it now, or we are going to be stuck in this mess for a decade. The longer the White House stalls, the worse things will get. It is about time they stopped listening to “conventional wisdom” and started listening to people who have been right all along.
6 comments
Gosh, I don’t know what to believe anymore. I really think that no one is sure how best to fix this matter. We’re all gaming on probabilities right now, but I think some trial and error is due.
After all FDR tried through The New Deal a variety of programs, some of which worked well, and some of which did not. But at least he tried.
That is exactly the pattern that we need to follow, CK, go back to the programs that FDR used and proved to work, and avoid the ones that failed. It can’t be a tentative approach, it has to be an all out assault.
When they removed the aid to states in the stimulus package, we set them up for failure and further job losses. In the case of local governments we are losing jobs that are needed, not losing jobs where a lack of demand means the workers aren’t needed.
If something major isn’t done, we are looking at a no growth decade.
No growth decade? I’m looking at a negative growth decade, a decade where the lifestyle of the typical American gets dragged back sixty years, where fundamental government infrastructure such as enforcement of mortgage contracts collapses because everybody involved in the transaction is bankrupt and/or disappeared and nobody has the foggiest notion who owns what anymore, where millions of Americans are squatting in deserted foreclosed homes without utilities or indoor plumbing and where our oligarchs huddle even closer within their closed-off enclaves while protected by thousands of heavily armed guards to keep the plebes from swarming their gates and hanging them from the nearest oak tree… I am seeing the collapse of the United States as a functioning entity, into the sort of anarchy that characterizes Somalia or Afghanistan except with a population woefully unprepared for that kind of deprivation (self included)… in short, the end of life as we know it.
Hopefully I’m wrong. But President Obama’s poll-driven economic policy certainly isn’t doing much to reassure me.
– Badtux the Gloomy Penguin
.-= ´s last blog ..I leave civilization for three days and… =-.
They had better start stimulating this economy, because there are a lot of school systems that are not going have the money to hold classes if there isn’t a major boost.
They could start tomorrow with block grants to the states to stop the lay-offs.
They need to get their heads out and start listening to the people who called this disaster years ago, and that doesn’t include anyone currently on their economic team.
We need to revive HOLC to clean up the mortgage mess. We are already seeing people in foreclosed properties winning free houses, because the banks can’t produce a mortgage. The Florida legal aid people have already figured that out, that the banks don’t know where the real mortgages are.
Get Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini in there, not the current “conventional wisdom” hacks who were complicit in the mess. But it ain’t happenin’. Because a) they’re too smart to take that rewardless job, and b) the Obama administration has no use for people who go “off message” and you know neither Krugman nor Roubini is going to agree to a gag rule or obey one if imposed, meaning they’d just get immediately fired anyhow.
I guess I better study up on how to survive sans modern civilization. Sigh.
— Badtux the Pessimistic Penguin
.-= ´s last blog ..I leave civilization for three days and… =-.
You already know how to camp, so you need the Army Survival manual and a few Euell Gibbons books. There’s food out there, you just have to recognize it.
Elizabeth Warren, who works as a consultant for Congress, should be in charge of regulating the financial industry. She gets it, and can explain it.
There are a lot of good people out there, but like you say, they didn’t get to be good people by parroting the party line.