We are entering a great depression and all I hear is economic voodoo.
In a TV interview last month, Vice President Joe Biden said the following:
Every economist, as I’ve said, from conservative to liberal, acknowledges that direct government spending on a direct program now is the best way to infuse economic growth and create jobs.
That statement is clearly false. As I have documented on this blog in recent weeks, skeptics about a spending stimulus include quite a few well-known economists, such as (in alphabetical order) Alberto Alesina, Robert Barro, Gary Becker, John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Robert Lucas, Greg Mankiw, Kevin Murphy, Thomas Sargent, Harald Uhlig, and Luigi Zingales–and I am sure there many others as well.
I am not a fan of big government, as anyone who has visited this blog more than once probably knows. Yet I try to digest and process all of the various solutions to economic failure that are being thrust into my brain like a nail driven by a hammer. Will government investment in infrastructure fix the problem? I don’t think so. The problem is a spending driven economy of instant gratification. Or am I wrong?
If we just keep throwing made up money at the problem how will that fix it? Won’t that just make it worse for future generations? Someone please explain how a spending problem will be fixed by spending more. It is quite possible I will be jobless in the near future. I don’t see how going further into debt would alleviate my situation and I don’t see how the U.S. government thinks that it can just continue spending its way out of basic irresponsibility.