re: #41 Obdicut

Rogue, do you seriously not think that FDR’s policies got us out of the Great Depression?

If by “policies” you mean the spending ramping up for war and the actual war itself then yes. If you mean the New Deal spending, then no.

I still don’t think you actually even know what Keynesian economics are.

What is it about the multiplier effect you seem not to be understanding? If the argument was “for every $1 we spent on government projects we got a $1 in return”, that idea wasn’t new and we could be talking about a dozen different economists. The biggest addition to the argument was the “Keynesian multiplier” effect. That’s why it’s adherents are so determined that it’s pure genius. The only problem is the multiplier isn’t demonstrable in real world application, only on paper. It’s weird that people want to ignore that part of the theory and argument since it was put out there as the basis for the stimulus package at the very beginning:

Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test
npr.org

There is only one central economic question about the stimulus: would things have been worse without it?

The answer, except from deranged Austrian Economic whackjobs, is “Yes”.

You might be right. The only problem is we’ll never know. What we do know is we’ve spent $666 billion dollars thus far and it hasn’t come close to what was expected or promised. Doing nothing might have made it worse but there weren’t many people advocating doing nothing. Quite a few were advocating doing a lot less than spending $666 billion thus far and since even the administration can’t gussy up the numbers to make them look even mildly convincing (otherwise they would have released it when someone might have been paying attention) I would say they understand the weakness of their argument too.