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Editoral Policy | Webeditorial
Newswire Archive                   Hidden

U.S. Economics

In the war in Afghanistan: US troops are not losing, nor are they suffering enormous casualties. But they're paying an enormous price in money, manpower, time and effort to take ground. US troops successfully secured the Afghan city of Kandahar and more or less kicked the Taliban out, but it took 18,000 troops to do so. Kandahar is the Afghan city nearest to Quetta, Pakistan and thereby the one that's the easiest to supply. Every Afghan city that gets similarly secured and pacified is going to cost even more in resources.

The Declare Peace Fair was held on the lawn opposite the Liberty Bell on the July 4th weekend. Coincidentally, the good ship "Audacity of Hope," which was bringing supplies to besieged Gaza "The World's Largest Open-Air Prison," was detained by the Greek government. 

Been there. Done that. Britain already tried what Republicans are now suggesting America do.

"The economic stimulus, which under the previous Labour government had stayed and reversed the recession, was withdrawn. And the policy course that Republicans insist is the single route to prosperity in the U.S. — massive public spending cuts — was afforded a proof of theory across the Atlantic. Conservatives there enacted exactly what Republicans propose here."

How’d that work for y’all? Erm, well, uh, under the Liberal Democrats, growth had been 1.1% in their last quarter. The Conservatives

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke offers little hope for working people

 

Stewart Alexander 2012

Conservative NY Times columnist David Brooks does a favor for what he terms "Demand Side theorists" by setting out a clear argument (Personally, I rather like his term of "Demand Side theorists" because progressive arguments against conservative drug and immigration policies have long focused on the demand side of the equation). Someone recently got me all flummoxed by making the argument that John M. Keynes came out against high wages as a stimulus. That made no sense to me at all, but as I had no idea where that statement came from or was based on, I couldn't really argue against it. So what Brooks did was to provide an antidote to the following problem:

I got into a dispute with right-wingers on the online comments section in the letters page of the Inky. They suggested I read a few pieces and then I would be enlightened as to their viewpoint. I gave them a snarky reply because I remembered the author of the first piece getting a very derisive reception from the lefty blogs, but agreed to read the articles with an open mind.

The first problem I found in reading Thomas Sowell's "A Mind-Changing Page" is his citation of employment figures:

What is money? Credit. What is credit? Debt. What is debt? Trust. In what should Americans trust? In Wall Street? The banks? The Federal Reserve? The U.S. Government? Themselves? God? Certainly the present financial crisis is a crisis of trust, and therefore ultimately a crisis in human consciousness. Aware of the greed motivating Wall Street and the thirst for profits driving the banks, Americans are suspicious of financial salvation emanating from these sectors. Ignorant of the fact that money creation, with passage of the Federal Reserve Banking Act of 1913, is unconstitutionally usurped by the privately-owned Federal Reserve Banking System from the U.S.

I wrote a piece called "The Great Recession." It prompted a follower of the "Austrian Economists" (A Libertarian group) to ask whether the Federal Reserve was pumping too much money into the economy and whether that was causing recessions.
I said I'd look into it and finally went to my local library after a few unsuccessful internet searches and asked about Federal Reserve Board interest rates going as far back as possible (It was easy to find rates going back a few weeks or months, but the librarian had to search for a bit to find them going back further) and I then pulled up a list of recessions (That wasn't hard at all).

I was communicating with a conservative in an online forum and he said: "...common sense and growing numbers of people around the world are basically saying that Obama's policies are throwing gas on the fire. Nobody, no country has ever spent it's way out of debt!" Well, that may be true (Though it seems to me that spending on solid, serious investments would indeed get a country out of debt as a positive side effect of growing the economy) but that's not relevant to the economic crisis that the US finds itself in today.