Cato Institute
by Ike Brannon and Chris Edwards
01/29/09
Federal policymakers are moving ahead with a huge $800-billion stimulus plan to return the U.S. economy to growth. Will it work? Decades of macroeconomic research suggest that it won’t. Indeed, the revival of old-fashioned Keynesianism to fight the recession seems to stem more from political expediency than modern economic theory or historical experience...
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9931
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Money for nothing won’t grow the economy
Boston Globe
by Jeff Jacoby
02/01/09
Commenting on my recent column about the bloated ’stimulus’ package making its way through Congress, one reader insisted that what matters most right now is getting money into people’s hands. ‘In the face of rapidly rising unemployment and idle productive capacity, any kind of federal spending will have a stimulus in the short run,’ he wrote. ‘Digging holes and filling them in would help to create jobs and consumer demand because those wielding the shovels would earn a paycheck that they could spend.’ More than 70 years ago, John Maynard Keynes argued much the same thing — that government spending on anything — ‘pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars’ — would generate a beneficial stimulus...
http://tinyurl.com/aopgyo
The financial meltdown and market failure
The Distributed Republic
by Brandon Berg
02/03/09
Many people who weren’t terribly fond of the free market to begin with have, predictably, been pointing gleefully to the recent meltdown of the financial sector as incontrovertible evidence that free-market economics has failed and that we need much more government regulation. And some more government spending and higher taxes, while we’re at it. This suggests to me a considerable degree of confusion regarding how markets work, when they don’t, and when we can expect government to do better...
http://itshrunk.com/1454a0
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=financial+meltdown
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=stimulus
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=recession
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=unemployment
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Keynesian
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Ike+Brannon
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Chris+Edwards
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Jeff+Jacoby
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Brandon+Berg