That worked during WW2. It won't work now, because the global economy is completely different than it was back then. Once again, you are stuck in the past.
What Is Wrong with "Trickle Down Economics"?
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That worked during WW2. It won't work now, because the global economy is completely different than it was back then. Once again, you are stuck in the past.
I took Econ 101, and what it had to say about Keynesian Economics on the black board didn't match what actually happened in the real world. I got a lot of stuff about Demand side economics and how the government is needed to be the big spender, it seems this only worked during World War II, when there was incentive for government to spend wisely and efficiently in order to win the War, when the government is not under pressure it tends to spend wastefully, and its better that government spend less if such expenditure is not needed. How well did pyramid building stimulate the Egyptian economy?
So you admit there was no case where Keynesian economic stimulus actually worked. World War II saved the Roosevelt Administration, and you wave you magic wand and say that no longer applies. I'll tell you why World War II worked, it was because a knife was held to the government's "throat" and like no other time, government had to spend efficiently and productively otherwise it would have lost the War, the Nazis would be occupying our country and sending us to work in labor camps at the point of a gun! People who wished not to have such a fate, people otherwise secure in their jobs worked real hard to achieve this victory, harder than any government has worked before or since. if Obama was smart, he would have declared an all out war on terrorism and mobilized the entire country to fight it, but instead he chose to make giant 700 billion dollar slush funds, buy car companies, and make government loans to solar panel companies, none of which contributed to defeating terrorism or which brought us out of this recession. You say no one could have brought us out of this recession, but that's like Obama saying no one can do better, so reelect him. Forgive me if I don't take his word for it, I like to run experiments, and this experiment has failed and I want to try another one. Obama has thus far promised only to do more of the same if reelected. Democrats sure are a patient bunch when one of their own is in the White House.
Well, thanks for ignoring everything else I said. It's clear you have no interest in discussion and just want to promote intellectually bankrupt ideology. Have fun with that.
First of all, what is usually thought at universities and called Keynesian is not Keynes but Hicks. In Chapter 19 of his General Theory Keynes argues that wage and price sluggishness are not the problem and that more flexibility might even lead to a deeper recession.
So what is called Keynesian is more of a classical reappropriation of some of Keynes' ideas.
Second, I am usually a monetarist. In normal times the only tool to smooth the business cycle should be monetary policy, flanked with a public spending system that is designed to not be pro-cyclical (especially cities often cut expenditures when revenues decline during a recessions).
Deficit spending only makes sense when you are in a liquidity trap (like we have been in for years) or when you face a supply-side caused recession like the oil crises. When there is a price shock monetary policy drives up inflation too much, inflation expectations rise and you enter into a vicious cycle in which inflation rises but GDP doesn't.
I hope you get my point. I am not dogmatically attached to any particular economist or school of thought, that's not how science should work, not even a social science. And while I don't deny that my political opinions influence my economic ones I always try to be first and above all a decent economist.
When some fellow lefties argue against free trade or sweat shops I argue against them like a good classical economist.
First, your 'a war increases public efficiency' argument. It sounds plausible at first and while I guess that the fear of being conquered by the nazis motivated some people the war economy is, like any large-scale governmental activity, a bureaucratic monster.
You pointed out before that bureaucracy is potentially quite inefficient so I fail to see why this shouldn't apply in the case of a military bureaucracy.
Your argument boils down to the purely ideological right-wing notion about the military which does not really belong to the government, i.e. when they speak about the evil and inefficiencies of government they actually mean 'government sans military'.
Second, your claim that a large scale war against terror would have ended this recession. It is hardly news that there is already one and it is more intense under this administration than under the last one (a simple version would be: out of Iraq, deeper into Afghanistan and Pakistan). And despite being a Nobel peace prize laureate military expenditures have not shrunk under Obama:
Finding times it failed is the challenge not finding it's successes.
Technically?
Just because you have a college degree in Economics doesn't mean that you are an Economist in the professional level a least bit. Unless Fox Business or CNBC call you up for your "professional" take, you're just a novice with BA degree in Economics IMO.
And your take about Friedman's is better than Keynes's doesn't really make any sense to me.
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Um, your graph ends before Obama was even sworn in.
Not that he cut spending.
Also, contrary to popular belief, the US was in a strong recovery just prior to WW-II and it had nothing to do with either trade or military spending.
Raise your hand if your country had the worst economic performance of any country in the world during that period.
*Raises hand*
Anyway, the next crisis looks to be the coming collapse of the Chinese banks, who've been giving Obama 40 cents of every dollar he spends. As it turns out, they seem to be in a vastly worse bubble than our housing was.
Their banks were making huge loans to their businesses, using commodities as collateral. A common one was steel. With a weakening of the steel market, some of those companies defaulted, so the banks went to the warehouses where the steel was, to take legal possession of it. The warehouses were empty....
But that's not all. Other banks showed up at the same empty warehouses, having made loans on the same non-existent steel. This is already starting to ripple, as the banks scramble to try and verify the collateral on other loans, and they're finding similar fraud. It's as if a bunch of Wall Street banks found out they'd loaned hundreds of billions to a bunch of guys who were all using the Brooklyn Bridge as collateral.
I think you can work through the horrifying ramifications of a full Chinese banking collapse (they buy our bonds, and hold our bonds).
First, your 'a war increases public efficiency' argument. It sounds plausible at first and while I guess that the fear of being conquered by the nazis motivated some people the war economy is, like any large-scale governmental activity, a bureaucratic monster.
You pointed out before that bureaucracy is potentially quite inefficient so I fail to see why this shouldn't apply in the case of a military bureaucracy.
Your argument boils down to the purely ideological right-wing notion about the military which does not really belong to the government, i.e. when they speak about the evil and inefficiencies of government they actually mean 'government sans military'.
Second, your claim that a large scale war against terror would have ended this recession. It is hardly news that there is already one and it is more intense under this administration than under the last one (a simple version would be: out of Iraq, deeper into Afghanistan and Pakistan). And despite being a Nobel peace prize laureate military expenditures have not shrunk under Obama:
And of the things about military spending is it often doesn't go the personel who are actually in the armed services - it goes to the companys who make the armaments - often funding airy-fairy research that seldom reaches it's goal (well except for being a nice bit of corporate welfare.).
it's a small example - but the U.S spends about $47mil p.a on developing microwave weapons - just a pity they are no closer now than they were 50 years ago.
http://www.nature.com/news/microwave-weapons-wasted-energy-1.11396
That's true. The level of total military spending bears very little relation to what's actually spent on personnel.
No money for basic protection of your ground troops but lots of money for inefficient research, not to mention the blunt corruption in the form of cost-plus contracts for companies like Halliburton during the occupation of Iraq.
But hey, the right-wing mantra is that everything about government except for the military is inefficient.
But hey, the right-wing mantra is that everything about government except for the military is inefficient.
No money for basic protection of your ground troops but lots of money for inefficient research, not to mention the blunt corruption in the form of cost-plus contracts for companies like Halliburton during the occupation of Iraq.
But hey, the right-wing mantra is that everything about government except for the military is inefficient.
No, our mantra is that no government spending is probably more efficient than military spending, which is itself insanely inefficient.
We had the Sgt. York AA gun (about $14 billion in today's dollars), Crusader artillery system (about $13 billon), Commanche stealth helicopter ($8 billion), A-12 flying dorito ($7 billion?). And that's the cheap, tracked, support vehicles, helicopters, and subsonic aircraft.
As they say, every time you pull the trigger, millions of taxpayers dollars get burned up.
Look at all the professional Academic economists helping out Obama now, what good are they? Many of them are from Ivy league schools, and have worked as university professors, but judging from the results they have accomplished, do they really know what they're doing? Considering we've had 4 years of recession, I'd say not. I keep saying they should cut taxes, cut taxes, but they don't listen to me, instead they try the same old thing, run up the deficit and spend spend spend and every time they try it, it doesn't work. So who really is the professional, just because they can put some equations on the blackboard and solve them doesn't make them good economists. So by government standards, I'd say I'm fairly competitive, since these folks policies aren't working, the Fed Chairman is incompetent because I see prices going up, he is not upholding the value of the dollar. Do you have some other standard to measure an economist by? Whether a liberal-Marxist professor gives him an A on a report per chance?
Efficiency in the military is measured by whether it wins wars or not. the purpose of government is to defend, and it can't do that if it does not spend on military equipment. I'd rather spend the cost in money than pay for it with the lives of fallen American soldiers. the purpose of the military is not only to win wars, but also to deter them, if we cut the budget, we may tempt the enemy into starting another war because it perceives weakness. The best way to prevent wars is to make it clear to the enemy that he will lose if he starts one. Democrats encourage the enemy to start wars because they always doubt whether we can when, and if they doubt it, the enemy figures he has a chance.No money for basic protection of your ground troops but lots of money for inefficient research, not to mention the blunt corruption in the form of cost-plus contracts for companies like Halliburton during the occupation of Iraq.
But hey, the right-wing mantra is that everything about government except for the military is inefficient.
No, our mantra is that no government spending is probably more efficient than military spending, which is itself insanely inefficient.
We had the Sgt. York AA gun (about $14 billion in today's dollars), Crusader artillery system (about $13 billon), Commanche stealth helicopter ($8 billion), A-12 flying dorito ($7 billion?). And that's the cheap, tracked, support vehicles, helicopters, and subsonic aircraft.
As they say, every time you pull the trigger, millions of taxpayers dollars get burned up.
No money for basic protection of your ground troops but lots of money for inefficient research, not to mention the blunt corruption in the form of cost-plus contracts for companies like Halliburton during the occupation of Iraq.
But hey, the right-wing mantra is that everything about government except for the military is inefficient.
How do you know how efficient research is going to be? Why didn't Thomas Edison invent the light build on his first try, why did he waste all his time and efforts of different ways of making a light bulb that turned out not to work? I have to ask, why didn't we have an atomic bomb in 1939? If we did, we could have prevented World War II.
30 months of private sector job growth seems to indicate they are on to something.
Obviously they do. The economic collapse was reversed, GM was saved, and we have all those months of job growth I mentioned above. Without the constant obstructionism from the GOP in the form of filibusters a lot more could have been done.
The recession ended in 2009.
What good would cutting taxes do? Taxes are already at their lowest levels in decades and all it's done is raise the deficit.
Cutting taxes is the same old thing. We had a better economy and a budget surplus under higher taxes.
I'll take the economists who can actually add and subtract over the ones who cannot.
Actually knowing something about economics would be a good start, so would some knowledge of history.
When a general calls for more supplies, to fight a battle, how quickly he gets them is a measure of the efficiency of the military. If there is a bureocracy that insists he fill out the proper requisition forms while he's surrounded by the enemy, and this causes him to lose the battle and be captured, then that is inefficiency, this is soon rectified by proper demotions and advancements of various supply officers. We won World War II because we had the most efficient military of them all.
Of course the military is the only government organization that faces competition on the battlefield with the enemy, if it loses that competition it loses the way and the country goes with it.
It was never fought on the scale of World War II, the government spent trillions of dollars that was not related to fighting the war, we could easily have out numbered the Afghan troops with all our soldiers, we could have surrounded them and defeated them, instead of the handful we actually sent.
Yes, doldrums that continue until the sun runs out of hydrogen.
The private sector job growth isn't keeping up with population growth, which means we're going backwards in per-capita terms (jobs per potential worker).
If you adjusted employment for population growth, or real GDP for population growth (making per-capitareal GDP the measure instead real GDP), we probably never got out of the recession, making this something we could call a "per-capita depression."
The economic collapse may have been just temporarily staved off, depending on whether China's banking system implodes under the weight of fake collateral. That's only been revealed over the last couple of days, kind of like us when we were seeing the first tranches of bundled mortgage securities go under.
But don't worry. If Obama is in charge when China goes under, I'm sure he'll make it very clear that the drastic consequences are not his fault.
Economics is indeed liberal in the sense of classical liberalism. It has nothing to do with Marxism though and the attempt of the right to portray centrists as lunatic lefties is becoming quite boring. You don't care one iota about whether what you think and say matches reality.
What measure? Well, I'd say not getting your data right is an easy measure to determine total inaptness:
And if you come with this 'inflation is measured incorrectly nonsense', here is an alternative measure which also shows that there is no skyrocketing inflation around the corner. If you hadn't slept through your economics lessons you would also know why: a housing bubble burst which is deflationary and since interest rates are close to zero the tripling of the balance sheet of the Fed doesn't lead to massive inflation.
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