On Apr 24, 2009, at 4:44 PM, SA wrote:
> Speaking of which - Doug, you sometimes seem to take the position
> that the bourgeoisie has gotten the whole bailout thing down to a
> science, so the damage to the economy will be limited to that
> extent. There's some truth to this,
Like I've been saying, I think they can prevent a total collapse, but they can't generate anything like prosperity anytime soon.
> but I just looked up some stats on the Japan case. The only thing
> that kept their economy from suffering a worse depression than the
> 1930's US was the massive deficits they ran. But those deficits
> increased Japan's public debt as a share of GDP by 70 percentage
> points over 15 years. 70 percentage points! In today's US terms that
> would come to something like $10 trillion of more debt. Anyone
> looking at the political climate today would have to conclude that
> even a fraction of that stimulus just isn't politically possible.
> The US has some big fucking problems.
Well yeah. No disagreement from me on that.