frustratedDean Baker | Stimulus and Jobs: We Can Do Better
Dean Baker, Truthout: "The Obama administration came out with its first set of numbers on the jobs impact of its stimulus package. It's pretty much along the lines of what was predicted. To date, the package has created close to one million jobs. That is good news, but in an economy with more than 15 million unemployed workers, it is not nearly good enough. We need to do more, much more. Fortunately, there is an easy and quick way to begin to get these unemployed workers back to work. It involves paying workers to work shorter hours. The mechanism can take the form of a tax credit to employers. The government can give them a tax credit of up to $3,000 in order to shorten their workers' hours while leaving their pay unchanged."
We have swarms of unemployed people already who feel useless. We have a highway system that is literally falling apart. We have schools short on teachers, hospitals short on practitioners, heck almost every company has cut back workers and therefore isn't getting as much done. We have a gazillion repairs in need of doing because people can't afford to call a plumber or roofer or whatever. And the government wants to pay people not to work?
AAAAAAAAA *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* Is it raining FAIL today or what?
How about the wacky idea of paying people to DO some of the stuff that's not getting done for lack of funding? Or hey, we could pour some grant money into overworked charities so they can chip a bit to their volunteers -- like, say, food pantries, all of which are running on overdrive these last couple years.
November 2 2009, 22:51:50 UTC 11 years ago
Really?
November 3 2009, 07:11:06 UTC 11 years ago
What I learned in history class: The stock market caused the crash. Hoover was accused of doing nothing but supposedly actually kept things from being worse. Roosevelt won by promising to end things, then was generally a wonderful person. The book did mention that the saying "A switch in time saved nine" originated from Roosevelt threatening to stack the Supreme Court with six extra judges that would be nicer to his progressive policies, but that was the only bad thing that was said about him and even that was cast in a "Roosevelt was trying to help, but the Justices were standing in his way" light.
What I learned from independent study: The Federal Reserve was the ultimate cause of the crash; they kept interest rates artificially low which encouraged creditors and the stock market to boom/bust under the premise that nothing was wrong. Bailing out the Bank of England from its own follies in 1927 didn't help either. Hoover made things worse with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and by keeping wages artificially high, which although that was great for workers that managed to keep their jobs, it did cause serious spikes in unemployment. The banks that failed were predominantly ones that were hampered by government regulation that kept them from opening multiple branches and thus from diversifying risk (if you're invested in your local farm community, they all grow wheat, and wheat has a bad year... good luck with that). Rather than pay people the gold their treasury notes were worth (dollar bills were redeemable for gold and silver back then), Roosevelt instead devalued the money supply and confiscated the nation's gold. Owning gold became literally illegal and stayed so for the next forty years. He also went into wage and price fixing, the Blue Eagle was used to denote compliant stores. The Agricultural Adjustment Act destroyed food, plowed over fields, and payed farmers not to plant crops in the name of artificially inflating prices. Yes, destroyed food, in times when people were starving. People were arrested for failing to follow government price regulations; one particularly famous case involved a tailor that was charging too little money to hem pants. The WPA did such fun things as pay men to dig ditches, then pay them the next day to fill those ditches in again (I have a friend in CA who personally promised to take me to view the "Road to Nowhere" the next time I was in town). When the Supreme Court ruled all these things unconstitutional, Roosevelt threatened to stack the deck; then when Roosevelt replaced all the old price-fixing regulation with new regulation that enabled the unions to do his dirty work for him, the Court was suddenly much more compliant. Surprise surprise. The Depression didn't start lightening up until WWII started swallowing Europe and Roosevelt realized that if he wanted to send stuff to the Allies, he would need to lighten up on business a bit in order to get it done. But it didn't truly end until 1941. What happened in 1941? We drafted a bunch of people and sent them overseas to fight until the war was over, which I suppose is one way of getting rid of your unemployed. And of course, by the time the war was over, Roosevelt was dead and Truman knew better than to keep playing games with the national economy (thank God).
Don't believe me? Do the research. I might have made a couple of minor misstatements, but I guarantee you the bulk is accurate. FDR was not a good guy, his policies did nothing but hurt the economy and make the depression worse, and we do NOT want Obama following in his footsteps (though frankly, I think it's a little late for that).