What exactly is behind the aversion to the Keynesian solution to unemployment?

[ck4829]

Tax cuts - Failed to boost employment.

Privatization - Failed to boost employment.

Handing out buckets of cash and other forms of corporate welfare to the rich and powerful - Failed to boost employment.

We've tried the right wing's ideas for years now, people are continuing to suffer.

Why not allow people to work, rebuilding roads, doing repairs to our crumbling infrastructure, etc. And if there's nothing else that can be done, just dig holes and fill them up again.

I think most of the "evil and lazy welfare queens" that conservatives keep whining about would actually be overjoyed if they were able to do this.

So, what exactly is the holdup? Should the rich and the corporations really be able to act as the gatekeepers for the American Dream?

[Captain Hilts]

1. The whole point of New Deal work programs was based on the good feeling people get from...working -

If you go back and read the stuff FDR, Eleanor, Hopkins, Ickes and Perkins all said, they consistently talked about the affirmation people feel from working and getting paid for it.

And, yes, 'priming the pump' does seem to work - look at all the deficit spending that Reagan used to goose the economy. He was a closet Keynesian.

[Captain Hilts]

2. Reagan's huge spending can be seen as Keynesian. Yep. nt

[sendero]

11. Exactly..

... his administration was Keynesian welfare for defense contractors.

[Captain Hilts]

15. ...done all on borrowed money. nt

[Raineyb]

21. Only if you pervert the word. n/t

[Xolodno]

28. Heh...Reagan wouldn't be "electable" in todays...

....Republican Party.

[RKP5637]

3. Corporations, for the most part, don't give a S*** about the country and the people, only

their bottom line... and corporations own congress and the administration. And with the lame SC's personhood decision for corporate contributions it will only get worse. This is not a country, it is now USA, Inc., and will only get worse as corporate contributions take off and Americans continue to allow themselves to be duped by propaganda, vote in the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and then whine about congress.

[izquierdista]

20. Not even that

As long as the CEO and a few of his golf buddies get to take home big bonuses, as long as they can milk it for all they can get, screw the corporate bottom line.

[RKP5637]

22. Yep, they managed to take it even one step further into decline as an

economic system that once worked for the benefit of the country.

[zeemike]

4. The first employment project should be

100,000 or more investigators to go after tax cheats and government contractors fraud and abuse.
that right there would pay for other job creation....and perhaps put an end to the greed that has ben set free to pray on us for years.
the second one would be a team of scientist, and engineering people to design a mass transit for the 21st century....then make it happen and hiring thousands everywhere it was needed to do the job.

And there are dozens of other ideas that will help us all.

[RandomThoughts]

5. Money was not given to the rich to boost employment.

They just threaten to move money overseas if they do not get what they claim is their cut of every dollar.

Hence race to the bottom. If you do not run your country with the worst working conditions, you will not be competitive. One of those conditions is bribing people with money to spend some in your country or state. It is a statement of who has the power to spend money in a society.

Your comment of a few people being the gatekeepers is only because people allow it. What is there real claim to that status?

There are a few made,

claims of superiority,

claims that money goes to those that are suppose to decide (note in that claim, if they lost all there money to something else even a tax, that would be just by their definition)

claims that only they are capable of running the economy, hows that working out, pretty good for them, which tells why it is not a good idea, and why representative democracies do much better if they make the social legislation.

claims that it is the best system, as price setting, planed obsolescence, and even intentional scarcity keep product from reaching people, and consumerism tries to create demand, all so production can be brought bellow demand so that it is profitable to do business. Grow enough food to feed everyone in the world with extra to spare, and capitalism will try to stop it because it is less profitable then scarcity. Capitalism works when competitive to increase production and efficiency, it is terrible at setting social policy.


It was never about creating jobs, they just got enough people to say it in paid for think tanks, that people actually started to believe it. It was bribery and corruption. If you pay a think tank to churn out some doctrine for enough years, people start to believe it.


Business will cut a job every time they can, cutting labor cost is very profit effective, they don't make jobs. They only will hire someone if they think that person will make them money by that persons work filling some demand from society.

So creating demand in our system makes jobs

[FormerDittoHead]

6. Yes.The "thinking" is that Keynesian spending is only good if it's for whites, I mean, the military.

As you write, the "market" has FAILED to produce well paying careers to the inner city. (of course, they would argue because blacks are naturally lazy and are unwilling to work hard like they do. Blacks, therefore, 'deserve' what they have.

Conservatives seem to think there is this firewall between the military (where white people work for high salaries) and the rest of the "free economy".

But if you "give away" money to blacks (basically what they think of gov't projects) you will set back the chances of them finding "real" work by not letting their "wages" "compete" on the "free market". (ie: pay them with dirt, or just bring back slavery)

What they don't go on to think of is that private employers are more likely to hire people with some record of employment and experience, and that people working even in WPA style jobs have money to spend on their kids' education.

Otherwise, paying 10,000 people a billion dollars over 10 years and having a bridge to show for it is a better bang for the buck than to produce a single fighter jet which will never be used.

[Romulox]

9. What a red herring that is! The TRILLIONS to the banksters mostly went to "whites"...

Your post is an example of "using the race card" in order to defend the status quo (tons of government money to corporations, little for regular people.)

"Conservatives seem to think there is this firewall between the military (where white people work for high salaries) and the rest of the 'free economy'."

#1) Our military is disproportionately of color
#2) Our President (a "centrist" African American) has offered no support for a WPA style plan, but has waxed eloquently about the "sanctity" of taxpayer-funded bonuses to Wall Street investment bankers.

Your race based analysis is off-base--our President is no avenger for the common man. :hi:

[Romulox]

7. Hard-core Rightwing economic ideology

The same reason our "leading economists" assure us that our precipitous drop in standard of living has not a thing to do with the government's policy of encouraging outsourcing to third world sweatshops.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

8. Many of the beneficiaries would be African American

'Nuff said.

[rurallib]

12. yep - that is a good part of it.

[stray cat]

10. That was suppose to be the stimulus package - but the dems didn't do it

[MadHound]

13. Keynesian economics are socialism, the New Deal was communism,

Keynes was the first cousin to Engels, FDR first cousin to Marx.

This is the rhetoric that has filled our political discourse for the past thirty years, and sadly the Democratic party has bought into it. Thus they flee the very solutions that gave them a solid power base for forty years, thus moving farther and farther to the right to the point where they now sit where the 'Pugs used to be, while the 'Pugs sit over where the Birchers were.

Meanwhile, we on the left are ignored and forgotten, and our country continues right off that cliff.

[RKP5637]

23. Good analysis IMO. n/t

[HughBeaumont]

27. And the ex-Birchers are now the Klan. The Tea Klux Klan, if you will.

While the country shifted to the right, what evaded everyone's eye was the socialization, the downward shift if you will, of corporate risk and loss. The wealth and perks? Kept mostly at the top, guarded by armies.

Like one big, tattered Rubik's Cube that will never be solved.

[Ignis]

32. Oh, I will.

And I'm stealing that moniker for my own use. :)

[customerserviceguy]

14. "...just dig holes and fill them up again..."

If you advocate that, then it's pretty hard to criticize Alaskan "bridges to nowhere", isn't it?

[MadHound]

16. The jobs programs of the New Deal weren't makework,

That actually laid down the infrastructure that our modern country was built on. The same could be, and should be done again.

[RKP5637]

24. To date, IMO, we've been feeding the same mechanism that brought us this

mess. I see little innovation to date, nothing like FDR did... basically, it has been about propping up the same old stuff. I've been quite disappointed, I had thought we would have seen/experienced what FDR did... We are stuck in the same paradigm with the same methodology being used. No real "real" progress.

[customerserviceguy]

30. I wasn't arguing with New Deal programs

that have proven to be of lasting significance, I was just saying that condoning make-work projects designed to do nothing other than merely employ people for their own sake makes it difficult to criticize public works projects that have very limited value, other than as pork.

[Bigmack]

26. The difference is that the boosters....

of the bridge were all "get government off our back" conservatives.... "no welfare" types. It was the hypocrisy that pissed me off, not the project.

Personally, I've never had a problem with make-work projects, and long as the money gets to the actual workers. If the project really does something, all to the better.

[customerserviceguy]

31. Well, then you must really be a fan

of student grant and loan programs for courses of study in which there are no jobs. That's where individual citizens get to decide what they're going to spend government money to pay college teachers to dig and fill the holes in their brains. At least the pork public works projects actually have to go through some sort of feasibility and environmental impact studies.

[Bigmack]

33. Probably be better if the courses of study....

would lead to jobs, but even though... it keeps the profs employed and the students off the streets. (That may come to be very imortant.)

See, I think a few paltry $ Billions for such "waste" doesn't even begin to compare with, oh... say the F-35.... or the Seawolf sub. Sure, the MIC gets jobs, but they are truly make-work jobs, with no value to society.

It's pissing away pennies vs. pissing away Benjamins.

[The2ndWheel]

17. This is why humans have such an impact on the environment

Got nothing else to do? Dig a hole for no reason so that you can go buy something. Funny that it sounds exactly like our debt based financial system.

[OHdem10]

18. FDRs New Deal despised by Republicans and some in our own

party. Remember the Reagan Revolution was based on
dismantling the New Deal.

Centrists in our party such as Lieberman have stood in
Fox News Room and referred to those "tired old programs"
showing disdain for the New Deal.

Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps or starve on the
street. No one is owed anything.

Until we understand where the Republican Party is coming from,
we will just dawdle on.

[cbdo2007]

19. What exactly is behind you thinking this would all happen over night?

Give it time.

The economy didn't collapse in 1 year or even in 2 years. It took longer and it will take twice that long to rebuild.

[DBoon]

25. higher employment = higher wages = a more confident workforce

and the rulers of our economy want wages as low as possible

And they want compliant workers who are afraid of losing their jobs

[bvar22]

29. The "Uniquely American Solution".

"..they want compliant workers who are afraid of losing their jobs.."

Why else go to such lengths to protect the Employer Based Health Insurance System?

The RICH have been assured that they will never know a day of discomfort.
The Working Class has been told they WILL compete with 3rd World Slave Labor for their jobs.

[troubledamerican]

34. Cheap Labor = Neocon goal. Destroy the Middle Class.

Keynesianism creates the Middle Class. The Middle Class is an artificial construct. It doesn't exist in a Wild West economy.