If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
What if the Treasury borrowed $2 trillion dollars in a series of 100 year bond offerings at say 4.5%? Rather than have the government waste the money on unneeded projects or squander it on more bank bailouts, the $2 trillion of proceeds could be distributed to the American people.
Paul Krugman's book is called End This Depression Now! (exclamation point included). If that sounds like a self-help book -- the sequel to Listening to Prozac, maybe, or something by Dr. Wayne Dyer -- that's not altogether inappropriate in this age of collective near-despair.
Let's coordinate a mass rehiring of workers on a voluntary basis by asking all large and medium-sized employers to increase their employment by 5 percent.
Back in the 1930s, it took FDR two goes to get his New Deal up and running. It is time for the Obama Administration to take heart from that, and have a second go itself.
Let's tax the wealthy, help homeowners, and spend some money to put more people back to work. When that's done we can pivot to deficit reduction -- with millions of additional workers able to contribute to that effort with their taxes.
I've pretty much stopped exhorting policy makers to engage in deficit-financed fiscal stimulus, not because we no longer need it -- we do -- but because it feels like a waste of time. With the fading of the Recovery Act along with state and local budget cuts, U.S. fiscal policy has turned contractionary. Yes, the economy is getting better, and pretty consistently at that. But it's still a slog, and gas prices are pushing the other way, among other factors. So I'm going to briefly drag the idea of stimulus out of hiding for two reasons. First, there's been a spate of research on the bang from fiscal stimulus in certain situations. And second, because Europe is providing such a sad, natural experiment of this forgotten thesis.
The fastest growing category of employment is in temp work, followed by health care and "leisure" -- which is described as consisting primarily of "food service and drinking places." If it's "morning again in America," at least we know somebody's been hired to pour the coffee.
What exactly does Larry Summers have to do to stop being offered important jobs? Hold up a liquor store? Kill a guy? That is the question many are as...
The Western world is divided between two visions of our economic future. One is of austerity and the other is of growth. One is of hope and possibility, the other of despair and cynicism. The battle between these two visions has divided the United States and the entire Western world.
President Obama's political opponents insist that the stimulus did nothing to help the economy and some even claim that it made things worse. The numbers, and a newly released video, tell a very different story.
Mitt Romney's got real economists on his team. If he wants to make the case that things would be better if we followed his plan, which is explicitly anti-stimulus on jobs and would liquidate the housing market, let's see the economic model for how it would work.
Government intervention has created millions of jobs. But those interventions were too small, so we're still years away from fixing the problem. It's time for Democrats and their allies to stop partying like it's 2019.
If you stop listening to Obama read his speeches and start watching what he does, you realize he's anti-small business all the way.
If we want to create jobs, a more competitive dollar provides an excellent alternative to the Keystone Pipeline. It can create many more jobs and it won't threaten the environment.
I was recently asked how some of the key economic indicators are trending going into 2012 from the perspective of the president's record. When Obama took office in January 2009, employment was absolutely cratering. Now it's growing, and, in the private sector, has been since the spring of 2010. The swing from huge negatives to positives is notable and helpful to the president. So he has some strong trend reversals to point to, though while the trend is his friend, the sheer levels still bedevil. Current profits as a share of GDP signal the return of rising income inequality, a major concern for a lot of people today. But here Obama has a very strong case to make that the Republicans' game plan will only make that problem a lot worse.
So what do you do when financial analysts are warning that housing prices are headed for a "triple dip," the second largest Swiss Bank (Credit Suisse)...
