DISQUS

DLS · 6 months ago

The main lesson of the moment the 1930s can teach us is there, if we're able and willing to learn: All the spending and make-work ideas failed to end the depression, and the stimulus to date has achieved what are laughable (or pathetic) results. Rather than creating four million new jobs, later revised to be creation or savings (note) of three and a half million jobs, the results widely reported have been a mere 150,000 such jobs.

Stimulus or public-works spending (to date or more to come) and the un-inevitability of economic recovery generated from them is also a lesson Japan should have taught more people already, though once again it really is a matter of being able and willing to learn.

I just hope the wrong lessons, about what "needs" to be done, or what many Dems in Washington (both in the Obama administration and in Congress) are hinting at dangerously wanting or thinking to do, will be "learned" [sic] from experience to date (and earlier).

DLS · 6 months ago

The monstrous growth of the federal government and the open flirtation with fascism then has its counterpart (threatening to get much worse) currently in Washington, is another lesson that should have been learned from the 1930s, but seems in Washington to be "learned" that so many people can be fooled or will comply with whatever Washington does to them that more such growth and fascistic flirtations are able to be and even should be sought. (How long will it be, for example, before we have a "pay czar" not only limited to banks and the propped-up Detroit dinosaur cretin-companies but extending across all the corporate world, limiting incomes to reduce "the income disparities in America," and going from there to having Washington issue other forms of direction to executives and emplacing itself on boards of directors and so forth? Mussolini or supporters of Hitler's "vampire economy" would have been proud.)

stillalive · 5 months ago

while my education is moderate,i am low income opion.
1st the programs set up to protect us from rippoffs was a complete failure-time to re-design them!
2nd the support to the poor from state/fed help is wonderful but drains us,-this i dont have an answer for?
3rd our military budget is too high,time to downsize and protect our own shores not the world!
4th there will be poor always,looking at the history of an area will decide if a change will help! greed,corruption,all of these contribute to the downfall of a goverment!...you cant change the world if it doesnt want to change!...
5th criminals we pay to feed and house are draining us,3rd strike you lose citizenship!..export to someother country where they can be used for helping poverity nations.