Follow this link to Robert Kuttner’s open letter to David Axelrod.

He urges David Axelrod to advise President Obama’s team to take a more radical approach to fixing the economic crisis.

Kuttner is on the same side as Krugman, but the way he states his case is not all negative about the Obama team performance.  I hope he has more success in getting President Obama’s attention.

Follow this link to a piece by Mark Hulbert that explains why this stock market downturn may have a lot further to go. His claim that this might be the first genuine bear market in three decades gives further credence to Kuttner’s call for more radical action.

Follow this link to read the full text of  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

You can also sign in and leave a comment.

This site links you to the five parts that are on the Government Printing Office web site. Initially the GPO site will be very busy and might not respond.

Follow this link to Paul Krugman’s column February 15th in the New York Times.

His interpretation of the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances is that there has been no wealth creation in the United States since 2000.

Earlier today I posted a link to remarks by Robert Kuttner.  He noted that 40% of the economy had been in financial services.  It occurred to me that if you take out that 40%, what is left may be a real measure of the size of our productive economy.  I wonder if that number is commensurate with what the Federal Reserve has discovered.

Follow this link to read Robert Kuttner’s prescription for the economic crisis.

Perhaps he said it before, or someone else may have said it.  Japan didn’t get out of its economic malaise of the 1990s until it finally made the banks realize the losses that were hidden in their books.  He is now saying the U.S. must do the same.

One of the things that I have been saying for a while is that with so many of our manufacturing jobs having been outsourced, soon the world will discover that the management of these jobs can be outsourced as well.  The only thing the U.S. will have left in our economy is the financing through our banks.  Then the world will realize that, with the jobs and the management having been outsourced, they no longer need money management from the U.S.  Then we will have nothing to support our economy.

Maybe that day is arriving much sooner than I thought.

Follow this link to the article in Huffington Post that quotes the Obama one-liner

Asked if he would be so willing to reach out to Republicans in the future, the president responded, “You know, I am an eternal optimist. That doesn’t mean I’m a sap.”

For those old enough to remember, they used to call comedian Henny Youngman the king of the one-liner.  I think Obama may well merit the title in the political sphere.

Follow this link to George Soros’ prescription for the economic crisis.

The article is long and the details are way beyond my limited knowledge to critique. The ideas sound reasonable to me on first reading.

I did, however,  note his statement that massive liquidity needs to be inserted into the economy to prevent deflation, and then when it works this liquidity must be drained from the system as fast as it was inserted.

Independently this thought had occurred to me and I discussed it at the end of my blog post Analogy That Explains The Stimulus Package. I am encouraged that I have been able to see some issues that coincide with the advice from someone with the vastly greater knowledge that George Soros has.

Follow this link to Paul Krugman’s New York Times column.

With friends like this, perhaps we don’t even need Republicans.

According to Krugman, Obama’s plans aren’t enough and Obama is too weak to get more.  Obama managed to get almost $800 billion in stimulus just a few weeks after taking office, and this shows what a failure he is?

Maybe Krugman is using reverse psychology.  Taunt Obama enough so that he will try extra hard to prove you wrong.  Well, if Krugman wants to guarantee his position on the outside looking in, then this is probably the best strategy.

I wonder what would happen if Krugman tried to write an article that would help Obama improve on what he has already accomplished? Maybe he has been on the outside so long he doesn’t remember how to do that.

I just heard Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News ask his business correspondent in frightened tones, “What if the stimulus package is too small?”  The correspondent uttered some mumbo jumbo, but did not come back with the obvious retort.

“Brian, what if you went to the grocery store and didn’t buy enough food?  Would you sit in your home and starve to death or would you go back to the store and buy more food?”

Earlier this evening the local news reported that there were enough local infrastructure projects to spend eight times as much money as Massachusetts is getting in stimulus funds. Given that, I don’t think there would be any problem putting more stimulus money to work should it be needed.

When it is very difficult to calculate whether a program is too big or too small, you can pick a size that is your best guess and then measure the effect as you go.  If it is too small, you can add.  If it is too big, you can stop before you have spent all the money.

Maybe the Bush administration would have assumed that they had it calculated down to the nickel and would just plow ahead without measuring.  Fortunately, the people in the Obama administration are far too rational to take that path.  In fact they want to put all the information out to the public so that there are as many eyes as possible watching what is going on.

With the way George Bush ran things, you really have to wonder what he learned at Harvard Business School.  How did they ever decide to grant him an MBA degree?

I subtitle this article Getting Away With Murder.

Follow this link to the article in The Nation. Perhaps you will be shocked and appalled.

I was told to look up this story at a lecture by Tim Wise at Clark University last night.

The lecture was Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama.

Tim Wise was a community organiser in New Orleans for 15 years after graduating from Tulane University. He said that the stories about the violence perpetrated by black people in New Orleans after Katrina turned out to be unsubstantiated.  However the violence of white people against blacks was substantiated.  He told us to Google Algier’s Point. This is a neighborhood in New Orleans where white vigilantes shot and killed black people.  Nobody has ever been charged or interviewed by the police about the crimes let alone prosecuted or convicted.

I knew it would be worthwhile to go to a Tim Wise lecture because of posts that I have collected on this blog.  See Tim Wise: On White Privilege and Tim Wise – WHITE LIKE ME. Sharon and I found ourselves well rewarded intellectually for attending this lecture.