… so we need another one now, focused on supporting state and local expenditure.
… so we need another one now, focused on supporting state and local expenditure.
Really, folks, this isn’t rocket science. And the political cost of passing a second stimulus will be trivial compared to the political cost of heading into the midterms with 10% unemployment.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
How about the political cost of 10% unemployment AND our creditors deciding to cut us off? They're already getting antsy.
Based on what? Non rising interest rates? Sure China could cut us off resulting in them losing billions of reserves and halting their economy causing political unrest. I think they'll avoid that.
Let's see, which scenario makes our creditors more likely to cut us off: "saving" a few hundred billion now in return for a GDP (and hence ability to pay) that remains a couple trillion dollars below potential for the next half-decade or more, or borrowing more money now and reducing the amount of foregone GDP from $10-20B to $5-10B?
How about pretending to do the former, while actually throwing another trillion or two down a rathole? We're not borrowing to "invest", we're borrowing, as we have for a couple decades, to maintain a federal spending level we're not willing to levy the taxes to pay for. I don't think the Chinese have been fooled for quite some time. They were willing to finance our spending habits for as long as they were confident we'd keep up the payments, but they were under no delusion we were "investing" it.