bonddad, bobswern, gjohnsit (read this) and many others have put a lot of effort into the debate on the state of the nations economy. Today the CBO also released figures - 2010 and 2011 more of the same for employment. Given all the effort I hope DKos can learn something
- Economics is as much politics as science and the expectation of a V shaped recovery will drive less aggressive policy changes than a L, U or W.
- Imagine a scale of desire for change to economic policy where one is someone wanting just enough change (bailouts and stimulus) to maintain the status quo and ten is someone wanting an immediate policy clean slate.
1 - Lawrence Summers (the Cheney of economic thought)
2 - Rahm Emanuel (Obama Administration rejected Freedom of Information Act request for Freddie Mac board minutes and correspondence during Emanuel's time as a director.)
3 or 4 - Timothy Geithner
5 - President Obama
6 - bonddad
7 - bobswern
8 - plus believe in peak oil
Folks in my opinion all of the fierce debating on green shoots on DKos amounts to the difference between a 6 and a 7 on the scale of economic policy change. Now imagine President Obama trying to drive policy surrounded by three advisers as energetic as bonddad and bobswern but hanging out in the 1 - 3 neo-liberal stay the course area of the scale. Contrast the debate between bonddad who believes this is a severe recession and bobswern who thinks more Great Recession with the President listening to his top economic adviser still saying things like this in June
While the causes of today’s crisis will be debated for many years to come, I believe that history will confirm this moment to be one of those rare occasions that Keynes wrote of where self-equilibrating markets break down. In these rare moments, vicious cycles replace self-correcting markets. Instead of falling prices leading to more demand and less supply, falling prices lead to more supply, driving prices down and creating a downward spiral. Nowhere has this been more evident than in our housing market, where lower prices led to increased foreclosures leading to less demand – because no one wants to buy a house whose price is about to fall.
This is the economic equivalent of the "few bad apples" argument. Our normally fine tuned economic engine needs minor spark plug gap adjustments.
All of this talk about tone and being careful with invective debating the difference between 6 and 7 while loony Lawrence continues spouting neo-liberal crap to which the most mature response I can imagine would be to throw a shoe at him. (For God's sake Summers you just type "self correcting market" into the Daily Kos search engine and your first hit will tell you "The Market Is Not Self-Correcting". Either our search engine has passed a Turing test or you are not fully human.) And I just grabbed one of Summers speeches at random - it came up first on google. I could post any one of his speeches on Daily Kos and, far from the rec list of bonddad and bobswern, it would probably be HRed out of existence.
I know everyone is very busy with health care reform. But now is the time to gear up for the battles after health care reform. The nation is in too much trouble to think that health care reform is sufficient and unless we start agitating now the public option will become the one bone thrown to the middle class. Instead we need it to be the first in a series of real change. And the way there is to begin the economic education that will at least put us all above five on the scale of desired Unites States economic policy change.