If there were any doubts about the health of the economy, two reports issued in the last ten days should have eliminated them. First the second quarter GDP showed the economy growing at just a 2.4 percent annual rate. Then the Labor Department reported on Friday that the economy created just 12,000 jobs in July after removing the impact of temporary Census employees. Both reports are really bad news about the economy’s near-term prospects.
So, we are sitting here with a moribund recovery that promises to leave tens of millions of people unemployed or underemployed for the indefinite future. And the political options at the moment seem to be between Democrats who tell us things are good and Republicans who say the economy stinks, but don’t have a clue on how to make things better.
Just to be clear, we do know how to make things better, we just lack the political will. Spending money creates jobs. Even Tea Partiers will work for money, in most cases even if the money comes from the government. Unless the private sector somehow will spend less because the government spends more (tell me the loony story, I love fairy tales), then more stimulus will create more jobs.
More stimulus does not have to create a debt burden for our children. The Fed can buy and hold bonds so that the interest is paid to the Fed and refunded to the Treasury. Japan’s central bank has done this and its interest burden is less than ours even though its debt is more than three times as high compared to the size of its economy. And, its main problem continues to be deflation – inflation is nowhere in sight.
The Fed can do more. It can set an inflation target of 3-4 percent. This would give businesses more incentive to invest. (Suppose that they knew all prices would be on average 15 percent higher in five years.) It also would alleviate the debt burden of homeowners by raising their nominal wages and house prices.
Finally, if we can’t boost the economy, we can restructure work. Germany and the Netherlands have both gone the route of work sharing, using unemployment benefits to give firms credits to shorten workweeks rather than layoff workers. The unemployment rate in the Netherlands is hovering near 4.0 percent. In Germany it is 7.1 percent, but that is lower than it was at the start of the downturn.
There is no excuse for the mass suffering the country is now experiencing. The people in charge messed up disastrously. They are still messing up disastrously. The public has every right to be furious at the incredible level of incompetence shown by those in charge. They should demand better.
This Economy Sucks
“Incompetence shown by those in charge”? This assumes A) that politicians are actually trying to fix the economy, and B) that they are in charge. I see no reason to think either of those statements are true. Republicans want to extend the Bush tax cuts — they want to repeat the very thing that got us into this mess. They saw what happened to the economy under Bush, and they think that repeating his policies is suddenly going to have a different effect? Does that sound like a group of people who are trying to fix the economy or a group of people trying to give what’s left of this nation’s wealth to the very rich?
And why do you suppose they are doing that? Who spent obscene sums to put these people in Washington in the first place? Don’t you think they expect some return on their investment? And it’s probably the only decent investment left: The rate of return on a politician has stocks, bonds and all that other worthless shit beat hands down.
Don’t kid yourself, they know what extending these tax cuts will do to the economy. They just don’t care. Because they aren’t paid to care. They are paid to transfer as much money as possible from the rest of us to the small group of very, very rich people. That’s how they measure their success; the damage they do the overall economy in the process is an acceptable, if inevitable, “side-effect.”
The United States is a turkey, and it’s two days after Thanksgiving. There’s almost nothing left, and the rich are picking at the bones.
This is the worst economy I’ve ever seen in my life, and I lived through the recessions of the 1970’s and 80’s, the first 2 oil crunches in 1973 and 1979, and the dot.com bubble burst. This one is for real, it’s for keeps, it’s for all the marbles. When I see these brainwashed dummies on CNN say “go recovery” I get angry, do they really think we are that stupid to think this is a recovery ? Things are actually a lot worse than they even would venture to admit and tell us. We are SCREWED.