Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

RedState 1/23/2009

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Erick Erickson over at RedState helpfully offers up a handful of points a day to help us focus our concern. Today’s are available here. I notice that they all make for fun blogging because they’re usually controversial or involve some untangling of logic or information.

Today we have four:

  1. Because Rep. Barthold of the Joint Committee on Taxation cannot predict how many jobs the stimulus will create, we should ditch the stimulus.
  2. TARP has not unfrozen the banks. Nationalization could discomfit important shareholders.
  3. In trying to figure out who to blame for Palin’s bad press, a new culprit has been located, Nicolle Wallace whom McCain appointed.
  4. Mean Republicans (including McConnell) are trying to get Senator Bunning (KY) to retire so the seat doesn’t go Democratic. Senator Bunning is awesome.
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  2. Because Rep. Barthold of the Joint Committee on Taxation cannot predict how many jobs the stimulus will create, we should ditch the stimulus.

    <

    p>That’s the symptom that’s the tip of the metaphorical iceburg.  There is not consensus among economists that stimulus is the solution.  That’s the principal at issue..  Furthermore, there is not consensus among economists that stimulus of the New Deal did anything but prolong the depression..

    <

    p>

    TARP has not unfrozen the banks. Nationalization could discomfit important shareholders.

    <

    p>Keep in mind, that discomfitted important shareholders include among many, some very, very large pension funds, and 401(k)s of millions of people, such that the discomfitted shareholder might be you.  Besides, the implicit presumption is that the State could run the bank much better.  “…but, but, but…Sweden…” (a million little progressives cry out in pain, then were silent”.

    <

    p>3 & 4…I could give a rat’s ass.

    • Amity Shlaes, to whom you link, has been a frequent target of Krugman’s (no surprise). He quotes the following:

      But the most telling fact about the new rush to spend is that its advocates have insisted on invoking the New Deal. They tend to gloss over the period when the phrase, “We are all Keynesians now,” was actually first uttered: the mid-1960s. (Uttered by Friedman, in fact, though he meant only that we all work in the terms of the Keynesian lexicon.)

      The Great Society of that period was the ultimate Keynesian experiment, and it didn’t work very well.

      This is intellectually dishonest though:

      The Great Society wasn’t deficit spending, it wasn’t intended to create jobs, and the economy of the 1960s wasn’t depressed.

      In other words, the Great Society programs, whatever its merits, was not a test of Keynesian prescription.

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