Jed Rothwell wrote: > Many of Obamas supporters, including me, have grave doubts about > spending a trillion dollars to revive the economy.
I have few or no doubts about the need for such a remedy. >From what I have read -- long ago, it's true, when I was in school -- the attempted remedies at the start of the Great Depression were (essentially) identical to the remedies used today. In short: When seriously under water, inflate sufficiently and you'll float back to the surface. But the remedies failed -- obviously, totally, they failed; the money supply collapsed and stayed down; unemployment went sky high and stayed that way for years and years; it's been said, with only slight exaggeration, that the thing that finally pulled the United States out of the depression was mobilization for WWII. So, why did the remedies fail? As far as I could tell, they failed because, while the government was using what seems to have been the right kind of stimulus, they didn't do enough of it, with enough dollars, for long enough. It's like they administered an antibiotic but stopped after one dose, and then the patient went serotoxic. Things look every bit as grave now as they were then, and this time around we can't mobilize our way out -- we're *ALREADY* in a major war, and if anything we're likely to demobilize during the next few years. So, no, I don't doubt in the least the need to administer something absolutely enormous, totally supersized, in the way of a stimulus to get things going again. The patient's heart has stopped; this is not the time to quibble about the cost of new batteries for the defibrillator.
