"The easy way out usually leads back in."

The Kantian-Lutheran philosopher of realized reality, Karl Von Clausewitz identified the difference between what was planned and what actually happened as "friction." In much the way that friction slows and stops a ball rolled across a floor, the friction of human events, the "for want of a nail, a horse was lost; for want of a horse, a kingdom lost," beats us all up.

I find a stark irony in John "Biggy" Boehner blasting the Democrats and Obama for not putting everybody back to work in less than six months. (AXE NOTE: Law 7 of the The Fifth Discipline: Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. ) We've had nothing but jobless and near jobless recoveries since the dot.com bust. There are a number of problems that plague the job-market, but bitching about a trillion dollars not producing jobs is kind of interesting as a tactic, but not a good strategy. Bob Herbert says it really well:

Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb. That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo. (AXE emphasis and comment: The Times may be moving from the staid gray lady mode, what with color and occasional cartoons, but Herbert is too much the gentleman and Bill Keller, the Managing Editor too much a wuss to say what they really thing. It's not mumbo jumbo, it's fucking delusional! Utter goddamn bullshit, taking an economic definition and applying it to life. I'll pass over the Will Rogers thing about " a recession is when your neighbor loses his job but a depression is when you lose your job... Now, the definition of a recession is X number of quartes where the GNP shrinks. Governments, banks and the mega-rich worry about economic definitions, as do reputable social scientists. I, as you probably have noticed, am a bombthrower. The recovery is a fucking disaster for real goddamn people.) Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me. (AXE note: The Parable of the Boiled Frog.) The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis....There were roughly seven million people officially counted as unemployed in November 2007, a month before the recession began. Now there are about 14 million. If you add to these unemployed individuals those who are working part time but would like to work full time, and those who want jobs but have become discouraged and stopped looking, you get an underutilization rate that is truly alarming. (AXE commentary: I keep waiting to see a quantification of that underutilization because it's going to shock people.)

Now, Paul Krugman and a number of other folks not blinkered by definitions have repeatedly pointed out that the stimulus package was probably not close to big enough. And, they started saying it a lot sooner that Big Boehner, except they wanted a different result. On January 25, Krugman's column led with:

House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan — which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape — looks like a lemon. Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

On March 8, Krugman got pretty specific...

As I read it... (the)  White House has decided to muddle through on the financial front, relying on economic recovery to rescue the banks rather than the other way around. And with the stimulus plan too small to deliver an economic recovery ... well, you get the picture. (AXE comment: Yup. Audacity bumped into "prudence" and "Temperance" and Audacity blinked.) Sooner or later the administration will realize that more must be done. But when it comes back for more money, will Congress go along? Republicans are now firmly committed to the view that we should do nothing to respond to the economic crisis, except cut taxes — which they always want to do regardless of circumstances. ( AXE Commentary: Ah, yes, another "Bush" recovery. Great idea. Fuck 'em.) If Mr. Obama comes back for a second round of stimulus, they’ll respond not by being helpful,(AXE Comment: Were they helpful the first time?) but by claiming that his policies have failed.The broader public, by contrast, favors strong action... But will that support still be there, say, six months from now? (AXE Commnet: Maybe. Start answering their question, where's ours?) Also, an overwhelming majority believes that the government is spending too much to help large financial institutions...

It helps to remember when contemplating the Republicans that Marie Antoinette wasn't being callous when she said, "Let them eat cake." She was trying to be helpful. If you have no bread, eat cake...yeah. On the 27th, in his blog, Krugman wrote:

Now, no doubt this is partly about politics, which, as Brad says, (AXE Note: Brad Delong, Department of Economics, UC Berkeley) makes some people stop thinking like economists...   ( AXE Credo: I have come to believe that politics makes people stop thinking... or, better stated, true believers and politics results in the confusion of thought with passionate intent.)...But I think there’s something else. Doing what I think of as real macroeconomics — the tradition that runs through Keynes and Hicks — actually involves thinking about interdependent markets, in a way many economists never learn to do. At minimum you have to keep straight the relationships among the markets for goods, bonds, and money; if you try to think about either interest rates or the price level in terms of just a single market — interest rates determined by supply and demand for lending, price level by quantity of money, full stop — you get it all wrong, (AXE emphasis) especially in times like the present...And as I pointed out a long time ago, many economists just don’t know this stuff. Even in macroeconomics, you could build a career without ever understanding what Keynes and Hicks were driving at — and if you’re under a certain age, perhaps without even ever having heard about it.

Ok, this could go on for pages. However, Paul Krugman and Brad Delong and Tom Herbert have gotten it right. Timmy Geitner, Lawrence Summers and gang including Treasury, Commerce and anyone else you want to think about have GOT IT ALL WRONG. One of the interesting things about Berkeley and Princeton is that they both have a tradition of not being solipsistic in their thought. One of the things about Harvard and the University of Chicago is that they do have that tendency. However, the guys that seems to underline Krugman's thinking appears to be Peter Senge and Russell Ackoff, and the need for systems thinking. Government doesn't lend itself to systems thinking -- departments equal turf wars and compartmentalization. The President and his closest advisers are supposed to systematize things, see the inter-relationships and look at consequences and then...then...make value judgements. In American politics today, the AXE suspects that the only consequence is the immediate and the only value is re-election. Madeline Albright asked the question of Colin Powell, "What is the purpose of having this marvelous military machine if you don't intend to use it?" Bad question, of course, as the Secretary of State should have included a priviso about using it wisely to accomplish things. But, same underlying issue for Batboy...Why accrue all this political capital unless you intend to wisely use it to accomplish things.

Comments

[sglover]

Well..... It's true that DeLong always said that the stimulus was too small. But he's spent at least as much time singing hosannas to Larry Summers, little Timmy Geithner, and ol' "Maestro" Al himself.

DeLong's interesting when he talks about economic history, but when it comes to anything more recent than, say, 1970, his chief value is as the embodiment of how utterly fucked academic economics is: His judgement is shit, but no matter how many times he's wrong, it never gets in the way of the central smugness.

DeLong not only purges (many) comments on his blog -- he sends **entire threads** down the memory hole! **There's** a devotee of "scientific" inquiry, you bet!

[sglover]

Oh, I almost forgot: I s'pose we oughta wait til the year's out, but I doubt that we're going to see anything better from Prez Hope'n'Change. This bullshit about "keeping the powder dry" and "saving political capital" is the exact same twaddle that the Dems used **throughout** the Bush years to evade doing anything to even **slow down** the Bush-Cheney gangster syndicate.

I expect the Dems will pull off another big score in 2010, simply because the Republican wing of the Unified Corporate Party is flat-out batshit insane. But I think there's going to be a big crashing tidal wave of disappointment and dismay very soon after that.

[supra shoes]

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[wine packaging]

Such a revealing video. Im kinda surprised for it.