Let me cull an extended quote from his August 15, 2011 New Yorker article "How Bad Is It?" It seems more pertinent than ever:
What sort of policies might make a real dent in unemployment? Providing subsidies to businesses that hire new workers is one. Extending extra tax cuts to firms that build new factories and offices is another. More radical ideas include investing in infrastructure projects, importing a version of the job-sharing scheme that Germany has used, and launching a national community-service program. Most of these things would involve the federal government’s borrowing and spending more money, but that, of course, is what governments are supposed to do in an economic downturn.
On Wall Street, unlike in Washington, there is general agreement that the 2009 stimulus package was one of the main reasons that the economy expanded, however slowly, in the past couple of years. So suggestions that a new jobs package would spook the markets are without foundation. Even now, after the bond downgrade, the markets and credit-ratings agencies would probably embrace a carefully costed package that is limited in duration, because it makes economic sense. The quickest way to reduce the budget deficit is to get potential taxpayers back to work.
The real barrier to a meaningful jobs program is not the markets or the ratings agencies but the G.O.P. If the Republicans were to vote down a jobs bill, however, it would hurt not only the economy but also, potentially, their own prospects. Meanwhile, for a Democratic President, especially one who has disappointed many of his supporters, campaigning as someone who fought to create jobs, rather than as a copycat budget cutter, would seem a winning strategy.
http://www.newyorker.com/...
For me this quote efficiently explains our odd political culture, the struggle to pass any act of congress, and the reason legislation is so often an inscrutibale product. I should share it here:
John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped that in America the only respectable socialism is socialism for the rich. Actually, Galbraith was wrong: socialistic schemes designed to help Wall Street have to be disguised. When they are carried out in the open, as was the case with the TARP, they create uproar. Evidently, many people would rather see financial collapses than bank bailouts. The attraction of loan guarantees and complicated insurance and financing arrangements is that while Wall Street investors understand the fiscal commitments that are involved, most congressmen and editorial writers do not. These opaque schemes allow the government to use the power of the public purse to stabilize the markets without disturbing the populace; hence their proliferation.
----John Cassidy, pp. 331-332 "How Markets Fail"