Thats my point, neither Bush or Obama did what it would have taken. They spent enough money to do it, but they didn't directly distribute enough money or create enough infrastrure rebuilding type jobs.
1. what is so awesome about construction jobs that everyone insists we must have more of them in particular?
2. Obama's stimulus spent massive amounts of money in transportation; agreed that it also spent massive amounts in pork, but the two are also often interchangeable. Bush's stimulus sent the money directly to people so that they could spend it (demand). SO, both tried Keynesian stimulus in manners approved of by Keynes, and it worked no better than it has in the past.
Basically, what the Fed did was an extention of the same failed Bush and Obama policy of creating or spending money without distributing it to the consumer.
that was, in fact, exactly what Bush's "stimulus" consisted of. sending money directly to the consumer.
It really doesn't matter how much cash banks have on hand, if the job market is shaky, banks aren't gonna lend because everyone is a bad risk.
on the contrary, it is our political system that is currently making risk default 'bad'; simply because the most important variable is unpredictable.
Unless that QE/QE2 money somehow got distributed to the consumer class, it was doomed from the begining.
the consumer is overrated. now don't give me that "70% of our economy!" junk; i
know that, that is part of the
problem.
Yep, FDR also failed, until the gov HAD to significantly increase spending to fuel the war machine. When they did increase spending ENOUGH, our economy recovered.
wrong; our economy didn't fully recover until the 50's. people who think that WWII somehow magically got us out of the Depression forget that 1. a massive draft isn't exactly a 'solution' to unemployment any more than enslavement is and 2. the economic condition of the American populace during WWII was
worse than it was during the Great Depression. everything from rubber, to eggs, to automobiles, and so forth was strictly rationed and in limited supply.
History may find that the alternative to reinflating our economy is a decade of economic misery. We are almost already a third of the way there!
history demonstrates no such thing. in fact, History seems to repeatedly demonstrate that attempts to "jump start" the economy inevitably fail, causing more economic pain. that decade of economic misery?
caused not by market crashes, but by government attempts to respond to market crashes by papering over them with artificial demand.
Here. Have some fun reading up on some history
:
Which U.S. president ranks as America’s greatest depression fighter?
Not the fabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt, since unemployment averaged 17 percent through the New Deal period (1933–1940). What banished high unemployment was the conscription of 12 million men into the armed forces during World War II. FDR actually prolonged high unemployment: he tripled taxes; he signed laws that made it more expensive for employers to hire people, made discounting illegal, and authorized the destruction of food; and he launched costly infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority that became a drag on states receiving TVA-subsidized electricity.
America’s greatest depression fighter was Warren Gamaliel Harding. An Ohio senator when he was elected president in 1920, he followed the much praised Woodrow Wilson — who had brought America into World War I, built up huge federal bureaucracies, imprisoned dissenters, and incurred $25 billion of debt.
Harding inherited Wilson’s mess — in particular, a post–World War I depression that was almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great Contraction from 1929 to 1933 that FDR would later inherit. The estimated gross national product plunged 24 percent from $91.5 billion in 1920 to $69.6 billion in 1921. The number of unemployed people jumped from 2.1 million to 4.9 million...
Harding’s Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover wanted government intervention in the economy — which as president he was to pursue when he faced the Great Depression a decade later — but Harding would have none of it. He insisted that relief measures were a local responsibility.
Federal spending was cut from $6.3 billion in 1920 to $5 billion in 1921 and $3.2 billion in 1922. Federal taxes fell from $6.6 billion in 1920 to $5.5 billion in 1921 and $4 billion in 1922. Harding’s policies started a trend. The low point for federal taxes was reached in 1924; for federal spending, in1925. The federal government paid off debt, which had been $24.2 billion in 1920, and it continued to decline until 1930...
With Harding’s tax and spending cuts and relatively non-interventionist economic policy, GNP rebounded to $74.1 billion in 1922. The number of unemployed fell to 2.8 million — a reported 6.7 percent of the labor force — in 1922. So, just a year and a half after Harding became president, the Roaring 20s were underway. The unemployment rate continued to decline, reaching an extraordinary low of 1.8 percent in 1926. Since then, the unemployment rate has been lower only once in wartime (1944), and never in peacetime.
The Roaring 20s were a time of unprecedented prosperity. GNP expanded year after year without inflation. Productivity improved, and real wages increased. The stock market tripled. There was a dramatic expansion of the middle class. The Great Migration occurred during the 1920s, with some 7 million African-Americans moving north for better schools and job opportunities. Women had the vote. Millions of Americans began to buy cars, originally a luxury of the rich. People bought radios that enabled ordinary people to hear the finest entertainers in their own homes. Movies became popular. Frozen food made possible a more varied diet year-round. Doctors developed new medicines to fight deadly diseases like diphtheria and tuberculosis...
