Krugman: Failure to provide more stimulus is a *CRIME* against American workers

[HomerRamone]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/unemployment-its-not-personal/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Suppose that workers have some quality – sticktoitiveness, or something – that doesn’t show up in official skill measures but which potential employers can intuit. Then workers lacking this ineffable quality would tend to lose their jobs and have trouble getting new jobs; the difficulty the long-term unemployed have in job search would reflect their personal inadequacy.

Read between the lines of a lot of commentary on the unemployed – especially from those eager to slash benefits – and you’ll realize that something like this is the implicit underlying theory.

But here’s the thing: the association between worker quality and unemployment should be much stronger in a good economy than in a bad economy. In 2000, with labor scarce, there probably was something wrong with many people who got laid off; in 2009, it was just a matter of being in the wrong place. So if unemployment was about personal characteristics, being unemployed should have mattered less for job search after the Great Recession than before. What we actually see, of course, is the opposite.

In other words, it’s nothing personal; it’s the economy, stupid. And as O’Brien said, it’s one more reason failure to provide more stimulus is a crime against American workers.

[laundry_queen]

1. +1 for Krugman. nt

[merrily]

2. I'm with Krugman on this one.

No one hesitated very long about TARP. Paulson made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, claiming Congress had to pass the bailout in a day or so, no strings attached.

Congress almost complied. I think it took a couple of weeks. And TARP was a drop in the bucket compared to what the Fed did for the next five years, all making them richer than ever. And who can forget those compensation packages? They certainly made the stimulus package seem underendowed.

That was for the people who crashed the global economy. Oh, and the head of the NY Fed, the single guy possibly most responsible for the banks and investment bankers that caused the crashed, got to be Secretary of Treasury. (Now, he making rounds publicizing a book about how he saved the economy.)

The victims of the crash got wholesale foreclosures, maligned by media and a lame recovery package, renamed a stimulus package to make it seem literally sexier.

On the other hand, I do get to pay my credit card bill by phone now, and the bill also comes due on the same day of the month every month, too. So, thanks Dodd Frank and Obama.

BTW, how did promulgating those tough regs under the Dodd Frank bill go?

Banksters vs. bank customers and Wall Street vs. Main Street. Guess who won in D.C.?

Why are we still paying the bills for that? Can't we at least withhold taxes, like tenants of landlords who don't fulfill their responsibilities to tenants get to withhold rent?

Hmmm?

[woo me with science]

3. K&R