What If?

Washington Monthly asks the question that I've been postulating:

In the cover story of the upcoming March/April issue of the Washington Monthly, economist James K. Galbraith makes the case for a much darker picture of what's in store. He begins by questioning an assumption held by nearly all modern economists, including those around Obama: that economies are naturally self-stabilizing, and therefore that economic slumps can be righted with relatively modest, short-term nudges from government. That idea fits the experience of every post-War recession. But what if the current crisis is less like those downturns and more like the Great Depression, when the economy famously failed to return to normal?

A Friendly Reminder

From Andrew Sullivan's "View from Your Recession,"

...sad to say, but this is no bubble. Industries will not bounce back like nothing ever happened as in previous recessions. The confluence of so many enormous issues, breakdowns, and turning points suggests nothing less than an epochal shift. Some industries will disappear completely; others will reemerge vastly different and/or much smaller than before. The road building industry, as written of here, is one of those.

So when we are thinking about bailouts of this and bailouts of that, let's first ask, "what is this industry's role in the 21st century's cleaner, greener, and ultimately more profitable economy?"

Double Whammy

So in the past week, the crumbling economy structured roughly around policies based in the Pleistocene Era has eliminated my Mother's job and in the Super Happy Motoring world she was stopped at a red light and plowed into by a driver going 60 mph. Luckily, she only sustained minor injuries, but in one of those not-so-ironic, not-so-unexpected collisions (pun intended) between the related worlds of economy and cars, the driver was uninsured to top it all off.

The question everyone needs to ask when they get mired in ideological debates and mundane issues is, "is there a better world out there?" And, "how do we get there?"

But first, put down your Ayn Rand. It was too boring anyway.

Anybody Qualified to Drive a Nail Thru a Railroad Tie?

I'm sure some of these people would like to learn how...

Time: On the Stimulus

I couldn't agree more:

TIME: How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

"A trillion dollars' worth of bad ideas — sprawl-inducing highways and bridges to nowhere, ethanol plants and pipelines that accelerate global warming, tax breaks for overleveraged McMansion builders and burdensome new long-term federal entitlements — would be worse than mere waste. It would be smarter to buy every American an iPod, a set of Ginsu knives and 600 Subway foot-longs."

"shovel ready doesn't necessarily mean shovel-worthy. Many projects are shovel-ready now only because they failed to clear the spectacularly low bar Congress set for pork in the past.”

Even if Keynes wasn't particular about where deficit spending should go during a recession, we MUST be. 1) we're too poor, 2) the right (and me) would lose their hypocritical little minds, and 3) it would only pronounce and prolong the issues, if not completely exacerbating them by spending on the same BS that got us into the mess.

“..states like Alabama, Kansas and Texas have been releasing lists of shovel-ready transportation projects that are dramatically skewed toward out-of-the-way sprawl roads. Missouri's list was all roads, none of them in St. Louis”

Tell me HOW an over budget DART green line does not make the list? The drawings are finished and the line is being built, yet all it needs is some o' that hot stinky cash.