How to recover from a modern economic depression?

[ksen]

Back during the Great Depression it took spending to conduct a world war to get us out of it.

If Great Depression 2 were to happen (which it almost did and some are arguing is currently happening in some eurozone countries) is there anything other than war spending we could do to help jolt the economy back to life?

What are your ideas we could do that would provide the equivalent charge to the economy that gearing up for world war would do . . . but without killing massive amounts of people?

 

[Valjean]

Maybe we could work out some sort of new deal...

 

[Nice Squirrel]

Gay sex. It is the only way.

 

[ksen]

I said without killing massive amounts of people

 

[Medicine Man]

Back during the Great Depression it took spending to conduct a world war to get us out of it.​

....At least, that what the RNC's pamphlets tell us!!



*

I guess Phil Gramm was just a little-too nostalgic for the Good Ol' Days.....




See: 4:45 thru 12:00​

 

[Nice Squirrel]

I said without killing massive amounts of people

You can't make an omelet without killing millions.

 

[SimpleDon]

Back during the Great Depression it took spending to conduct a world war to get us out of it.

If Great Depression 2 were to happen (which it almost did and some are arguing is currently happening in some eurozone countries) is there anything other than war spending we could do to help jolt the economy back to life?

What are your ideas we could do that would provide the equivalent charge to the economy that gearing up for world war would do . . . but without killing massive amounts of people?

War is actually very bad for the economy. It took twenty years to recover from WWII, except in the countries that were spared the destruction, the US, Canada and Oz. The privation in the war torn countries after the war was, in American scale, unimaginable.

So while the massive spending in the ultimate consumables, war materials, pulled the world out of the Great Depression, the use of those war materials and the destruction caused added up to a strong negative for the world's economy.

It is certainly within the range of possibilities to spend our way out of the current depression. But it would require a sea change in our economic policies and national economic will which currently is to increase income inequity, to reward capital at the cost of labor, to push ever increasing portions of the nation's income to the already wealthy.

 

[jonatha]

Ooooh!!! I know!!! I know!!!!!

Cut taxes.....

 

[coloradoatheist]

Didn't Paul Krugman suggest that we spend money in preparation for an alien invasion?

But even the idea that it was the spending of WWII that got us out has been controversial.

 

[NobleSavage]

I think we have enough economic knowledge to solve the old problems, but no one really knows about the new ones.

 

[SimpleDon]

Back during the Great Depression it took spending to conduct a world war to get us out of it.​

....At least, that what the RNC's pamphlets tell us!!



*

I guess Phil Gramm was just a little-too nostalgic for the Good Ol' Days.....




See: 4:45 thru 12:00​

I am sorry, I don't do videos very well, I don't hear very well but I speed read. So transcripts are very good, closed captioning tolerable and videos are a no.

Without question Phil Gramm is in the top three when you name those most responsible for the Great Financial Crisis that put us into the current depression. He is the posterboy for everything that is bad about so-called movement conservatism. And there isn’t much that is good about it. It is an unabashed greed fest by the upper class through the use of propaganda.

 

[SimpleDon]

Didn't Paul Krugman suggest that we spend money in preparation for an alien invasion?

But even the idea that it was the spending of WWII that got us out has been controversial.

Only with Austrian/Libertarian economics types. If you can't learn to ignore them you will never understand economics.

 

[ZiprHead]

The street in front of my house needs repaving. So do most of the streets in my town. There could be a good start.

 

[SimpleDon]

I think we have enough economic knowledge to solve the old problems, but no one really knows about the new ones.

Unfortunately the vast majority of economics today is not concerned with tomorrow's, today's or even yesterday's economic problems, but with research justifying income inequity, the diversion of ever increasing parts of the nation's income to the already wealthy. Today, no economist can expect to be hired into a half way decent academic position and to be published in the standard journals unless they stick pretty close to the orthodoxy, the so-called neoclassical fusion with Keynes. This includes Krugman.

The Great Financial Crisis and the subsequent depression not only wasn't foreseen by the neoclassical economics, they said that such a problem was impossible and their economic models lacked the tools that would have allowed them to foresee the problems. Their models ignored money and debt, for example. Do you ignore money and debt when you make your own economic decisions? Probably not.

To this day there hasn't been any attempt to correct these intellectual deficits. The problems go to the very core of their theories, they can't possibly correct them without sinking the entire rotting mess.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Didn't Paul Krugman suggest that we spend money in preparation for an alien invasion?

But even the idea that it was the spending of WWII that got us out has been controversial.

Only with Austrian/Libertarian economics types. If you can't learn to ignore them you will never understand economics.

It's funny that you criticize Krugman and his neoclassical models in a later post, but here you ridicule Austrian who do have the ideas on what caused the financial meltdown.

 

[Wiploc]

... is there anything other than war spending we could do to help jolt the economy back to life?

Spending is all it takes. It doesn't have to be war spending. It doesn't have to be spending on banks or killing.

Suppose the stock market fell by half. We could send a check for $15,000 to each American taxpayer. Normally a recession follows a market crash, but that recession would be over as soon as the post office delivered the checks.

Or we could prop up the market by buying stocks, or forgiving debt, or building roads, or making education and medicine free, or investigating stock fraud and supporting the Department of State and researching how to turn food into fuel and fuel into food and subsidizing Big Bird and paying big bonuses to whistle blowers like WikiLeaks.

It would be nice to have the money well-spent, but the necessity is only that it be spent on something.

 

[Medicine Man]

... is there anything other than war spending we could do to help jolt the economy back to life?

Spending is all it takes. It doesn't have to be war spending. It doesn't have to be spending on banks or killing.

Suppose the stock market fell by half. We could send a check for $15,000 to each American taxpayer. Normally a recession follows a market crash, but that recession would be over as soon as the post office delivered the checks.

Or we could prop up the market by buying stocks, or forgiving debt, or building roads, or making education and medicine free, or investigating stock fraud and supporting the Department of State and researching how to turn food into fuel and fuel into food and subsidizing Big Bird and paying big bonuses to whistle blowers like WikiLeaks.

It would be nice to have the money well-spent, but the necessity is only that it be spent on something.

​

 

[Medicine Man]

The street in front of my house needs repaving. So do most of the streets in my town. There could be a good start.

Maybe those boot-strappin' Libertarians could show everyone (else) how they maintain the roads in-front-of THEIR homes!!​

 

[arkirk]

Some of us here have the mistaken notion that WWII got us out of the depression. Actually there was a paradigm shift for the politicos at the time from publicizing debt and analyzing the war in economic terms and Pearl Harbor provided the grease for struggling industries to become war industries for awhile without people questioning the cost of the activity. There also was in WWII a paradigm shift in war itself with civilians becoming legitimate targets in the game. The massive debts the war incurred were buried in the excitement of the the war and we began to think there always has to be a war to feed the military industrial complex.

When I was a boy in the '50's that was pretty much what everybody thought. WWII pulled us out of the depression. Actually it was government employment of all types that pulled us out with the most useful type of employment and monetary circulation pump priming in the infrastructure of the country. Roosevelt was smart enough to do a lot of this even concurrent with the war effort. It was the clinging on to war as an economic tool after WWII that eventually led to submergence of public knowledge of the expense of war to our people.

Almost all of our public projects were pursued with the same zeal as if we were at war with something and that helped keep our foreign policy above question. In the mid 80's, Representative Ron Dellums produced a video titled "Defense Common Sense" that showed how skewing our economy toward war had resulted in a lot of production that was unusable for civil purposes which very much limited our economic options and leaving us with stockpiles of weapons we could not use and which required their own maintenance just to prevent weapons disasters. All the while, the banksters covered their tracks and responsibility for the Depression.

Unfortunately this weapons, war, and spying mentality can only produce shortages in the civil economy and then instability and then recessions. Since WWII we have had a regular procession of recessions and even guys like Ross Perot tried to point this out in his presidential run. What he was pointing to and rightfully so was the growing national debt that can only grow when such a large portion of our production is utterly useless in a civil sense. We also have a parasitic banking system that is creating debt for the public and wealth for itself. Military expenditures and the interest on these expenditures is slowly gobbling up resources that should be used house, clothing, feeding, and educating our own people.

When people talk about the debt, they want to cut expenditures that contribute to the health and safety of average citizens and never consider the hideous inequity in wealth that exists here. Militarism, while not all the problem always demands secrecy and that secrecy grant international thugs flying the American flag license to rob us all secretly...so you don't have the right to where you money is going and I guarantee is isn't anyplace good. It is a fact that much of this nation is being held in ignorance of very significant conditions that exist in our government. The hunt for Snowden and the convicting of Manning are clearly in support of continuing the robbery our people have sustained in ever increasing degrees since Eisenhower.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Back during the Great Depression it took spending to conduct a world war to get us out of it.

If Great Depression 2 were to happen (which it almost did and some are arguing is currently happening in some eurozone countries) is there anything other than war spending we could do to help jolt the economy back to life?

What are your ideas we could do that would provide the equivalent charge to the economy that gearing up for world war would do . . . but without killing massive amounts of people?

Is jolting the economy back to life synonymous with moving into a boom cycle? Again! Why not try to reach a State of Even Steven. Why not stop these cycles of greed and poverty. Do we not see these coming? Hells bells Margaret. I saw the housing bust coming. A blind man could have seen how out of whack things were.
Of course, none of it means a thing as long as money influences politics.