[lbo-talk] Tea Party: less than meets the eye

[Wojtek S]

What Krugman is saying is that the stimulus offered b O's administration was
inadequate - a point that nobody in this discussion seems to contest.  He
also says that O should have tried to push a bigger stimulus even though he
may have failed to push it through Congress, which is clearly an
acknowledgement of serious political obstacles to the stimulus (a point that
I was making as well.)  Furthermore, Krugman, and Marv, believe that O would
have been better off had he taken the risk and push the thing anyway, even
if it was bound to fail.  I acknowledged that it is possible, but I am not
sure why he did not do it.  May be he miscalculated, may be he got cold
feet, maybe he knew something that we (or Krugman) do not know.  So I do not
see much difference between what you quoted and what  I argued, except
conjectures about possible outcomes of the counterfactual.

Wojtek

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 7:01 PM, Jordan Hayes <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com>wrote:


> Wojtek writes:
>
>  I also think that you [Marv] are overly optimistic on what
>>
>> was possible for Democrats to do about bad economy.  I agree
>> that they should have been more aggressive about Repug attacks
>> but beyond that I do not think there was much more they could
>> have done.  This is pretty much Krugman's point - more should
>> have been done to stimulate the economy, but that was not
>> politically feasible at this time.
>>
>
> I don't think that's Krugman's point at all:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/opinion/25krugman.html
>
> |>    To avoid this fate, America needed a much stronger
> |>    program than what it actually got - a modest rise in
> |>    federal spending that was barely enough to offset
> |>    cutbacks at the state and local level. This isn't
> |>    20-20 hindsight: the inadequacy of the stimulus was
> |>    obvious from the beginning.
> |>
> |>    Could the administration have gotten a bigger stimulus
> |>    through Congress? Even if it couldn't, would it have
> |>    been better off making the case for a bigger plan,
> |>    rather than pretending that what it got was just right?
> |>    We'll never know.
> |>
> |>    What we do know is that the inadequacy of the stimulus
> |>    has been a political catastrophe.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/opinion/05krugman.html
>
> |>    Could Mr. Obama actually have offered such a plan?
> |>    He might not have been able to get a big plan through
> |>    Congress, or at least not without using extraordinary
> |>    political tactics. Still, he could have chosen to be
> |>    bold - to make Plan A the passage of a truly adequate
> |>    economic plan, with Plan B being to place blame for the
> |>    economy's troubles on Republicans if they succeeded in
> |>    blocking such a plan.
> |>
> |>    But he chose a seemingly safer course: a medium-size
> |>    stimulus package that was clearly not up to the task.
> |>    And that's not 20/20 hindsight. In early 2009, many
> |>    economists, yours truly included, were more or less
> |>    frantically warning that the administration's proposals
> |>    were nowhere near bold enough.
> |>
> |>    Worse, there was no Plan B.
>
> /jordan
>
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