Apparently you didn’t check that history good enough. According to the WH budget website government spending dramatically increased from 1931-1932 while revenues tumbled. Revenue in ’32 was 60% of what it was in ’31 while spending was 130%. So under what definition was that raising taxes and decreasing spending? FDR did that in the late thirties. Though there was much more in terms of increased taxes than decreased spending.

Almost a decade after Hoover FDR’s spending policies had done nothing to fix the economy. Don’t take my word for it though here is a quote from his Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.

“I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot!”

One of our biggest problems today is that too many people are looking to government to get us out of our problems. Too many people are declared disabled and given money for simply existing. I have a cousin who was born without the use of his legs and yet he has a job and a wife. This while I run into people in my day to day life that say they are on disability when nothing is visibly wrong with them. The money that pays for them doesn’t fall from the sky. They are drains on society when there is certainly something that they could do that would have a value to it.

@OnOfTheSheep: No apologies necessary; I understood your intention. Just a slight factual error and point of clarification.
I just remembered that the “Mormon” church does actually do something (separate from their welfare program) that resembles loans (a subsidised program, with low-interest or no-interest for loan beneficiaries). They have a program for supporting education in 3rd-world countries with poor social mobility and poor access to such loans (education is one of the few things the “Mormons” approve of borrowing for)… This program is called the Perpetual Education Fund. Details here for anyone interested:

http://pef.lds.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_E ducation_Fund

Why? I see this claim all the time presented as axiomatic and never with any sort of explanation for the mechanism by which it is supposedly true. Now, the traditional sense in which this sort of claim is understood is that excessive borrowing by the government raises the government’s cost of borrowing, which in turn raises the cost of borrowing for private sector entities. But that’s obviously not the case! Interest rates on treasuries are at near-historic lows and show no signs of rising, especially given the catastrophe that is the Eurozone. Given that that is the case, what exactly about government borrowing is supposedly stifling the economy?

My apologies. When I said “But requiring each to buy back their dignity by paying back the ‘help’ loaned so it is there for the next needy person is equally ‘good’ in that dependency is not allowed or encouraged” it was in the aspirational sense.

I tried to compliment this function of “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints”…no disrespect was intended. The information you provided was most interesting and enjoyed.

While I am not a theist, I, too, believe in attaining and maintaining self-reliance as essential to personal dignity. To such end, I, too, maintain “rainy day” funds and store food. I extrapolated and tracked what we use over a six month period as the Swine Flu epidemic arose. Better late than never.

My wife and I have, in the overall, lived within our means as we approach 48 years of happy marriage. So you and I have some core beliefs in common, even if differently motivated.

Do you need any other information to know that the USA is not a representative government with free and open elections?

Clearly you (and Lawrence Summers) just don’t know enough people who are struggling to find work, or you would not be so glib and inaccurate.

When it comes to extending unemployment benefits, you don’t appear to have cared enough to even be factually accurate. The maximum unemployment benefit duration has never been two years (104 weeks) but rather 99 weeks. And unless things have changed recently, the currently pending issue is not about extending beyond 99 weeks, but rather whether to let the temporary extension to 99 weeks lapse. So there is no issue about anyone getting 2 years of benefits, much less 3. Who’s propaganda are you repeating? Questioning the veracity of partisan sources would be called “due diligence.”

In fairness, you ought to acknowledge the Keynesian point of view, which would argue that the problem is not stimulative spending and tax policies now, but the difficulty in achieving effective commitments to restrain deficits once the recession is over. The likelihood that the Keynesian stimulus will at least partially pay for itself in quicker increases in taxable growth is at least as great as that of the similar claims of the “supply-side” tax and spending cutters drafting the House budget.

Lastly, as a matter of clarity, it would be better if you separately addressed the two upcoming tax issues: a temporary extension of the payroll tax holiday, and a complete or partial extension of the Bush tax cuts. The distinctions are politically and economically relevant. By not distinguishing between the Democrats’ clearly temporary agenda for payroll tax abatement (and extended benefits) from the Republicans’ immediate and permanent agenda for maintaining the (initially time-limited) income tax cuts, you create a false equivalency. Failing to note that a couple years of payroll tax holiday and extended benefits has much less fiscal impact than long-term extension of historically low income tax rates at the high end is in itself an abdication of fiscal responsibility in punditry. Or do you really believe that when unemployment gets back down to 5% the majority of Democrats will still be voting to extend unemployment benefits and reduce contributions to the Social Security Trust Fund? (If so, please explain why? It would be a major change from Democratic policy to date.)

In short, whatever thought and sentience you may have put into your comments about the overall inability of our political system to make difficult fiscal choices, you seriously undermine your credibility and objectivity by constructing your labor market analysis (in particular) from inaccurate and one-sided talking points. The conservative business and economic community have enough paid and acknowledged stenographers. Augmenting their propaganda for free only makes the possibility of a sane body politic less achievable.

Oh, and it’s “reining in” not “reigning in” – but then I only noticed that on my third reading.