This is a brilliant dissection of three glaring deficiencies of Obama's book --- Even from a "liberal reformist" point of view there were things that Obama could have done that would have mirrored some of the things that the Roosevelt Administration did in those two early years --- establishing Deposit Insurance, the S.E.C., appointing Eccles to head the FED ... and the research of the PECORA COMMISSION (which played a role in destroying the reputation of bankers and in effect creating a situation that kept them (and finance in general) in their place(s) until about the 1970s ---
A bunch of us on the left made such a proposal but it was totally ignored ... One VERY SIMPLE thing that might have been done in the RECOVERY ACT was to add a sentence or two that said that if the UNEMPLOYMENT RATE had not fallen to some low number by the end of fiscal 2010, the SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY would be spent beginning in fiscal 2011 to keep the recovery moving -- that would have INNOCULATED fiscal policy against a turn towards austerity (which ANYONE with any knowledge of the history of economic policy since the 1980s could have predicted --- as there was a turn towards austerity in 1990 and 1993) --- Instead, Obama started pleading for an infrastructure spending bill and the Republicans ignored him --- the austerity turn after 2011 played a major role in slow-walking the "recovery" which in my opinion paved the way for Trump .... > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3857): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3857 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78478399/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
