Saturday, July 4, 2009

Paul Krugman: We are heading right back to the 1930's, but with more Stimulus?

Paul Krugman says that the jobs report confirms that we're plunging right back toward another Great Depression.

We've lost 6.5 million jobs since the peak. After adjusting for population growth, we're down 8.5 million. As Richard Bernstein noted yesterday, wages and the workweek are also declining.

Obama's stimulus, meanwhile, promises to create 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year (if you believe the projections). So, by then, assuming no further loss in jobs (please), we'll be about 5 million below where we should be. And state and city budget pressures are wiping out many of the benefits of the federal stimulus. So we're setting ourselves up for another lost decade.

Krugman's answer, not surprisingly, is more stimulus now:

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.

Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted...

Read the whole thing >Link

5 comments:

  1. The major differance between then and now is that now exists the audacity of government to not be benign and carefull in their handling of the people, but rather to be callous and bold in brutefull disregard of the sanctity of human life, and to plan for and produce vast misery akin to Stalin and Hitler and the other fascists that have erred and now burn in the lake of fire.

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  2. Christianity/religion is all a lie that pays great dividends for the elite. You can't have genocidal wars and occupations without it. We couldn't be killing innocent Afghans right now without the fraud of Christianity. You can do the most evil things if it is GOD's WILL. Barf.

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  3. Numbers aren't close. U3 and U6 equate to 26,000,000 under and unemployed, out of 150,000,000 workers. 17%, ShadowStats has it at 20% now.

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  4. Two wrongs don't make a right , my friends.
    But you keep up your bad mouthing and tirades of Jesus. I'm glad you chose to waste your soul in the lake of fire. More room for me and the rest of the saints in heaven.

    Praise Jesus and Pass the Ammunition :)

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  5. You're exactly what's wrong with Christianity
    judgmental and hypocritical. Insteadnig aof talking about the lake of fire how about reading the Bible, start with Matthew 7:1

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