If I could talk with Manchin and Sinema, I would refer them to recent history, as in 2009-2010.

[DFW]

After the Cheney-Bush economic melt-down, all economists with their heads screwed on straight (and even a few that had them slightly askew) knew that a massive stimulus was needed to save the country's economy. Obama asked for a number more than twice as much as he ultimately got. Paul Krugman blasted the Republicans in Congress for whittling down the amount they would go along with, and when the economy finally sputtered back to life, Krugman noted that a lot of people would have been spared a lot of pain if the stimulus had been in the amount Obama originally requested. The recovery did happen, but it was slower, and with less impact than it could/should have had. Even in West Virginia and Arizona.

"Senators, if you could spare me three minutes of your time..........."



As a side note, I was talking with a top Republican strategist/fund-raiser a year or so later. He was railing on with the usual propaganda crap about Obama being a socialist. I stopped him and noted: Obama observed General Motors falling into a state of bankruptcy, had the government take it over, return it to profitability, and then RETURNED IT TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR. Since socialism is defined by state ownership of the means of production, Obama should have been stood against a wall and faced a firing squad by "his fellow socialists," since what he did went against every principle of socialism there is. Well, my right wing friend still tended to call Obama a "socialist," but more out of habit than anything else, and never again in any conversations with me. Right wing strategists tend to get unsettled when they are confronted with the fact that we are less gullible than they are.

[Kid Berwyn]

1. US taxpayer bailed out Wall Street and the world's banks.

Why not INVEST in America’s future?

Great idea, about the conversations, DFW! The thing is, Sinema and Manchin don’t want to know.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

The Real Cost of the 2008 Financial Crisis

The aftermath produced a lost decade for European economies and helped lead to the rise of anti-establishment political movements here and abroad.

By John Cassidy
The New Yorker, September 10, 2018

Excerpt…

The subprime fever originated in the United States, but soon spread to European behemoths like Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Credit Suisse: by 2008, close to thirty per cent of all high-risk U.S. mortgage securities were held by foreign investors. Although the major international banks were domiciled and regulated in their individual countries, they were operating in a single, integrated capital market. So, when the crisis struck and many sources of short-term bank funding dried up, the European banks were left tottering. In some respects, they were in even worse shape than the American banks, because they needed to roll over their dollar-denominated mortgage assets, and Europe’s central banks and lenders of last resort—the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Swiss National Bank—didn’t have enough dollars to tide them over.

Paulson and Bernanke didn’t predict any of this when they made the fateful decision, on September 14, 2008, to let Lehman fail. Paulson, in particular, was keen to escape the label of “Bailout King,” which he had been saddled with earlier in the year after orchestrating a rescue of Bear Stearns. An international banking disaster was avoided only because the Fed agreed to provide its European counterparts with virtually unlimited dollars through currency-swap arrangements, and to give troubled European banks access to various emergency lending and loan-guarantee facilities that it established in the United States. “The U.S. Federal Reserve engaged in a truly spectacular innovation,” Tooze writes. “It established itself as liquidity provider of last resort to the global banking system.”

But the Fed hid much of what it was doing from the American public, which was already choking on the U.S. bank bailout. It wasn’t until years later, as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act and a freedom-of-information lawsuit filed by Bloomberg News, that the details emerged. The sums involved were huge. According to Tooze’s tally, the Fed provided close to five trillion dollars in liquidity and loan guarantees to large non-American banks. It also provided roughly ten trillion dollars to foreign central banks through currency swaps. As with the seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout for domestic banks, practically all this money was eventually repaid, with interest. But, had the full scope of what the Fed was doing emerged at the time, there would have been an uproar. Fortunately for the policymakers, there was no leak. An official at the New York Federal Reserve, which helped enact many of the covert lending programs, told Tooze that it was as if “a guardian angel was watching over us.”

Continues…

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-real-cost-of-the-2008-financial-crisis

Capitalists don’t call it “socialism” when they are the beneficiaries. They call it “loan forgiveness.”

[DFW]

2. I think they do know, but are talking out of both sides of their mouths for as long as they can

We need to do this, except we can't do this, so we need to to do that, except that we can't do that, either.

This "Mikado" parody (Economists With No Plan/Gentlemen of Japan) is from the Bush era, but still applies: