September 3rd, 2009
 THIS PIECE is pretty long, and much of it is green-eyeshade stuff, but you owe it to yourself to read it all — even if you partly or wholly disagree with the points therein.
 I’ll be eager to see if anyone can offer comments that are a little deeper than the usual superficial sloganeering.
 An excerpt:
Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.
September 3rd, 2009
 
 THIS belies the theory peddled by right-wingers that stimulus legislation wouldn’t create a single job and would only make the economy worse.
 An excerpt:
Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter — something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus.
September 3rd, 2009
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 Nicholas Kristof PUTS THE LIE to a mistaken notion that’s become an article of faith among right-wingers.
 An excerpt:
Throughout the industrialized world, there are a handful of these areas where governments fill needs better than free markets: fire protection, police work, education, postal service, libraries, health care. The United States goes along with this international trend in every area but one: health care.
The truth is that government, for all its flaws, manages to do some things right, so that today few people doubt the wisdom of public police or firefighters. And the government has a particularly good record in medical care.
 POSTSCRIPT: This stuff reminds me, of course, of the following stories, which I related here a few weeks ago:
 The first one is of unknown authorship:
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.
I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.
On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.
And then I log on to the internet — which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration — and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.
 The second one is a tale former U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings used to tell:
 This is about a Korean War veteran who went to college on the GI Bill. He bought his house with an FHA loan. His kids were born in a VA hospital. He started a business with an SBA loan. He got water from the TVA and then from a project funded by the EPA.
The man’s children participated in the school lunch program and went to college on government-guaranteed student loans. His parents’ farm got its electricity from the REA and had its soil tested by the USDA. His father’s life was saved by a drug developed by the NIH, and the family was saved from financial ruin by Medicare.
 When the man’s house was damaged by floods, he drove on the interstate to an Amtrak station and took a train to Washington to apply for disaster relief.
 Then one day, he got angry about taxes and federal spending and wrote a letter to his congressman demanding that the government get off his back.
September 3rd, 2009
Amid all the shouting at town hall meetings, you never hear anything about THIS and THIS.
