"My colleague Dean Baker has put forth a plan for the government to provide a tax credit to employers for health care and also to increase employees' paid time off - in the form of reduced hours, additional vacation, sick leave, or other days off. This has the advantage of injecting money very quickly into the economy with minimal bureaucracy or waste."

I have a better idea. Why not tax the rich and reduce the tax burden on the poor and shrinking middle class. That way, spending would increase immediately as well, but no additional money would need to be printed. Taxing the rich is the elephant in the room. Economists are loath to speak of taxing the rich and therefore that is exactly what we should do. The rich accumulated their unhealthy levels of wealth through class warfare by buying the Congress and enacting legislation favorable to their wealth enhancement, while at the same time working to suppress wages. So American's should have no hesitation to tax wealth. The People need to frame the debate, not economists!

mr. weisbrot,

which "economists" did the wsj survey?

and why, mr. weisbrot, are there "no additional credit-worthy borrowers seeking loans"????

regarding your "cycle of declining output" you suggest employers receive additional tax credits for employees' health care. you want my self-employed tax dollars to provide for an employee's health care? you want employers to increase employees' time off, with pay? reduced hours? additional vacation? hey, just for your information, we're in a fucking depression. people can't afford to take a real vacaction. more sick leave? more "other days off"? are you nuts, or just stupid? how does that affect your "cycle of declining output"? americans, in general, are already some of the laziest, overpriced and overconsuming and non-thinking non-producers on the planet, and your idea of stimulation is to encourage that pattern of life?

how about this. lower credit card interest rates. lower gasoline prices, which in case anyone is paying attention, have increased by about twenty cents per gallon during the last two weeks, and by our glorious july 4th star spangled holiday, we'll be up to say, oh, about three bucks a gallon, as if our economy can handle that. how about allowing unemployed self-employed americans to qualify for unemployment benefits? and while you're at it, count them in the "official" unemployment numbers. how about, instead of bailing out banks and insurance companies and wall street crooks and robbers, bailing out the american citizens, not through tax credits, but with real cash? i'm not referring to the peanuts bush threw out either. how about, not tax credits, but real cash in hand for non-procreating citizens who find no need in an additional taxing of our already rapidly depleting natural resources? and finally, how about, not a tax, but a fine on stupidity. these, you clown, are just a few ideas, without much thought to the matter. should i see your byline on any other articles on this site, rest assured there'll be a few more.

here we have another professional economist in need of a byline, offering not one single solution or idea to a problem of monstrous proportions. common dreams, this article is bogus and a complete waste, not only of your viewers' time, but of space on your site. disgraceful.

Give money to poor people. They will spend it.

No, that doesn't mean, "making loans available."

Stop using debt as a social control device.

Want more economic stimulus, do ya? Check out the following video with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky on the Obama admin. giving the Wall Street thieves criminally responsible for the economic crisis roughly $1.4 TN, in addition to the admin. pouring another ... over $700 BN into the wars and war machinery or MIC; all using U.S. taxpayer dollars. The video's a little under 6 minutes.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13278

At one point he refers to roughly $1.1 TN, but am not sure that that's what he means at this point in the clip, for text beneath him shows 'billion', not 'trillion'. The $1.4 TN, however, now that appears to be accurate.

Aren't you simply stimulated by all of this economic crisis, Wall Street thievery, MIC hell, etcetera? Oh, so very stimulating; nearly better than a massage.

There is no shortage of money.

21 April 2009
In a letter to U.S. congressional leaders, Obama said the U.S. funding "does not represent a budgetary expenditure or any increase in the deficit since it effectively represents an exchange of assets."
The U.S. funding will boost the IMF's so-called New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB), an emergency facility established in 1998 that allows IMF member countries to provide credit to the Fund to deal with crises that may threaten the stability of the global financial system.
Obama urged Congress to quickly pass legislation to allow the U.S. to keep its G20 promises, and emphasized it would not require budgetary outlays.
"The United States transfers dollars to the IMF under the NAB, the United States receives in exchange another monetary asset in the form of a liquid, interest-bearing claim on the IMF, which is backed by the IMF's strong financial position, including its significant holdings of gold," Obama wrote.

What I want to know is why we are putting up with these economists who helped set up this crisis with their fiscal policies, didn't see it coming, and now are creating policies that give the banks who defrauded us all the money they want, no questions asked.

Of course, the automakers get Nada, but that's right. They employ union workers. Have to put a stop to that.

It seems to me the first common sense step would be to fire all those economic experts who didn't see this coming. Who needs experts who can't even see what is happening? After all, some did, and they were voices in the wilderness. As a matter of fact, they still are. And most recently I read that Paul Krugman mentioned the dread word "hyperinflation". He wasn't predicting it, he just said that in the direction we're headed it's a possibility. Obama better get a clue about economics fast or Geithner will drag his administration down a rathole. I don't know what's going on there. Is Obama dazzled by Geithner's resume? He should look at his track record instead. And Summers! His ego sucks all the oxygen out of the room he's in. He got fired by Harvard for heavens sake! How's that for a resume?

When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson

Did they talk to economists like James Galbraith or Michael Hudson, or just the usual elite group of neo-liberal/laissez faire types. Althogh Weisbrot makes good points, he seems to be caught up in the mind-set of the dominant economic paradigm in this country. Even Dean Baker falls into this general type. A tax credit for health care, for example, is a terrible idea for several reasons that the savvy CD readers already know.

What is not mentioned in the article is that if one includes the Fed's "liquidity injections", loans, guarantees, etc. AND the Treasury's direct bailouts and other support for the Banksters, one can come up with a figure of over 10 TRILLION dollars.

This sum of money could have been used in much more effective ways to ameliorate the crisis, why don't we talk about that for a minute?

greg r,

it's not my job to help someone else save their job through the use of my tax dollars. why limit your thought process to industrialized nations when referring to my comment about americans, in general, as being some of the laziest and overpriced and over-consuming and non-thinking non-producers on the planet? planet. get it? not industrialized nations. if you haven't done so already, go spend a week with the peasants in central or southern mexico or the mestizos in the high mountain valleys of chihuahua or the grape harvesters in central chile - hell even treat yourself to the highlands of guatemala - and see if your overworked american ass can keep up with them. then come back and tell me how it went.

people like you who go around taking snippets and twisting them to suit your own tunnel-visioned beliefs are a dime a dozen, and generally not worth spending time on.

if you've been around this site long enough, you would, with a basic grammar school education, know quite convincingly, my thoughts on the perils of this planet due to overpopulation and you would know my thoughts on the perils of our society due to increased stupidity which is directly related to overpopulation which is a direct result of stupid people breeding, and you would know my thoughts on the depletion of natural resources due to overpopulation and you would know of my being a proponent of, and an active participant in, green and sustainable building, which is a huge contributor to less consumption of energy. again, don't paraphrase my wording to show off your ignorance. i'm talking about the economy, stupid. raising gas prices now will do little to help an economy that's spinning completely out of control.

do yourself a favor and go back thru the archives here, doing a bit of homework before you decide to take my comments, or anyone else's for that matter, and twist them around to try a half-assed attempt at dialogue.

by the way, your comment about us being stuck with global climate change for centuries is a good one. if you mean we as in humanity, it's only a matter of decades that we're stuck with it. in case you're not paying attention, and it's quite obvious that you're not, the planet has been speaking for quite some time now. most people, and that includes some of the laziest and overpriced and over-consuming and non-thinking and non-producing people on the planet, could care less.

"lino April 21st, 2009 2:45 pm

greg r,

it's not my job to help someone else save their job through the use of my tax dollars. why limit your thought process to industrialized nations when referring to my comment about americans, in general, as being some of the laziest and overpriced and over-consuming and non-thinking non-producers on the planet? planet. get it? not industrialized nations. if you haven't done so already, go spend a week with the peasants in central or southern mexico or ..."

TRUE enough, but not entirely. There are actually many people working in the U.S. and working very considerably they are, or were, depending on whether they still have jobs or not. These people often aren't paid much compared to the average white American, but there are even white Americans who work plenty. Not all come from the wealthy and privileged classes or castes in the USA. I'm one who didn't. I'm one who lost a job as a computer professional on the false basis of not completing my work when I had and had completed half the work a team worker was supposed to do, but I guess he was of the privileged caste, because he did not 'feel', to quote him, like doing the work, and clearly also didn't 'feel' like informing management about this, instead choosing to let me take the "wrap" for his laziness. I did the accounting of all of the related work that had been done and learned for myself that not only did I do the half of what we were to complete together, each doing half, but did my half, half of his, plus plenty more. What took me on average around 2 days to do, he'd take a week to do; but he was of special privilege, had only a certificate in business, not a bachelor's degree, and a few years of trivial experience with SQL programming, while I had several years of real software systems engineering experience on very critical systems, a bachelor's degree, did a lot more work than he did, and was paid at least $10,000 a year less than he was.

Heh, some (or many) Americans are privileged and the rest of us just have to accept this, the privileged ones hold or have for principle.

That's white collar work. There are plenty of people working in low-paying sweatshot jobs and required to work ... en masse for the maigre earnings obtained, along with psychological abuse, etcetera. Guess they're not privileged, either.

During college and university, I worked two summer seasons as a farmhand; paid $1.50 less than min. wage per hour, because the government of the province of Quebec, where I was studying and residing at the time, allowed this break for farmers, and worked plenty of six-day weeks, 12-14 hours a day, grabbing every hour I could get in order to try to fatten up my [maigre] earnings a little. It was either that, or stay at home and twiddle my thumbs, for jobs were few, very few, and coming from a grunt-work, hard-working, ... Quebecois family, parents who knew many years of plenty of blue collar work at low incomes, well, I couldn't just sit home and twiddle my thumbs away hoping mom and dad would give me some dollars to go out and have fun with. Got only low-paying jobs during college and university years, but grabbed them and certainly did more than only earn my wages; and rarely needed job supervision.

That's only me. There are also other "Americans" (my ancestry is Quebecois though) who work plenty and willing to make sacrifices, also plenty.

Iow, you over-generalised, lino. I'd certainly work with the Mexicans and others of the south you mentioned in your post, but of course can't do that from up north and certainly have no financial means of going that far south; not even enough to travel south of the border! Even if I walked, I'd have no money for food and we kind of need that to get by. Just working with those people you referred to would be a privilege in this world, not because of the incomes they make, for that's of course low, but because of their work ethic, [heart], [soul], which would be a privilege to be a co-worker with. The low, very low wages would be painful, definitely frustrating, but working with those people would be [enrichening], for sure. There, there'd be opportunity to experience [real] humanity, real human spirit.

But, again, there are Americans who work plenty; without referring to the migrant, "illegal" workers who work more than plenty and under very unjust conditions, the most unjust in the USA from what I've gathered. The latter have a heck of a lot of real human spirit, soul, but aren't considered 'American' even if they are, continentally speaking.

"socialist April 21st, 2009 2:44 pm

Did they talk to economists like James Galbraith or Michael Hudson, or just the usual elite group of neo-liberal/laissez faire types. ..."

Pretty much agree about that and I don't know where Michael Hudson's articles are usually found, but people who also don't know and would like one website where a number of his recent articles on the economic crisis are found, then check the author index for him at www.globalresearch.ca .

===========================================

"Greg R April 21st, 2009 1:16 pm

Ok, you're angry. I understand that, but c'mon, complaining about your "self employed tax dollars" going to help others keep thier jobs is a wee bit selfish. I'm self employed too, but helping to save jobs is a very good thing for everybody involved. If people are off food stamps and unemploment benefits, then we tax payers are saving money."

PAYING taxes is important, as long as the amount does not [gouge] worker pay to the point of making workers [poor], and also as long as the tax dollars are put to constructively good use. Unfortunately, most tax dollars in the USA, as well as Ca, and perhaps other Euro-... countries aren't put to this kind of use. And subsidizing corporations while not making sure to provide for the poor what they need to be able to get out of poverty is [rotten] as hell politics, thievery, ...

Greg R:

"Calling Americans lazy is a bunch of shit. Americans put in more hours working than most industrialized nations. ..."

That Americans get fewer weeks of vacation, f.e., than Europeans and perhaps Canadians and therefore nominally work more weeks, so hours, does not really indicate that they actually work [more]. I gave an example in my prior post, the one just before this one, and the example's from my own experience, first-hand knowledge, while also telling only one of the stories I personally know about.

As a computer professional who worked in Canada, first, and then in the U.S., I was surprised to learn that the stigma applied to government computer professionals was a lot of bs, because the Canadian computer professionals in the Canadian government I worked with were much better than pretty much all computer professionals I worked with in the USA, in industry, not government, in the USA. Those were large corporations in the USA though. What I learned there is that jobs in large corporations in the USA evidently are generally easy-going. There were computer pros in the U.S. working as contractors and billing for hours not actually worked. It was easy for them to do this, because they could just get an agreement that a particular task or job would require x amount of hours, but while the computer pro. was really capable of doing the work in half of the agreed time. A "trick" is to open a work window in which files the person's paid to work on are loaded and then do what you want as long as management's not around; and when they come around, then put away the toys and bring up the work window. From my readings in computer consulting forums, plenty of pros in the U.S. did this; billing for hours that weren't actually worked.

Such types rack up a lot of hours, but really do little work. Do they deserve vacations, paid ones anyway? Obviously [not]. They spend half or more of their billable time on vacation; just that the hours are at client sites, when the work is done on-site anyway.

BUT it doesn't only apply to contractors, for corporate employees also were [no] better or productive than Canadian computer pros I worked with when I did some jobs for the Canadian federal government, a few of its departments. There were workers there who had work life not too easy, but still easy enough, yet no more easy than what I saw from working for several U.S. corporations, in telephony, banking, and engineering (avionics and more). The harder working Canadian government employees I worked with would make many if not most U.S. corporate employees seem almost like a joke for workers.

There are Americans who really are very lazy workers; again, see my prior post, just before this one, for an example of concrete, real kind. But that's not the fault of the workers; it's the fault of employers. And, as previously said, there also are Americans who do work plenty, too; the underprivileged class or caste of workers, perhaps more than others.

Anyway, and in this latter regard, Greg R, you also over-generalised; and omitted analytical details.

"freedomcorpse April 21st, 2009 5:06 pm

But when more new money is created out of thin air, it reduces the purchasing power of the money in your pocket that you worked for. ... In the solution you propose, immediate consumption is rewarded and savers are penalized."

TRUE, but who the heck is 'you'? It's [normally] good to state precisely who the 'you' is so that other readers can then know which post(s) to refer to in order to learn what the 'you' person had said.

After all, the post immediately preceding freedomcorpse's two consecutive posts is mine and I didn't specify a solution; certainly not one at all related to banks printing money anyway. If I had proposed a solution, then it was not done in explicit terms, for I never used the term 'solution', and also didn't intend to propose a solution anyway.

Only idiots don't know to precisely say who the heck they're referring to. Intelligent or competent communicators know to say who they're referring to.

======================================

"BeForKids April 21st, 2009 1:11 pm

What I want to know is why we are putting up with these economists who helped set up this crisis with their fiscal policies, didn't see it coming, and now are creating policies that give the banks who defrauded us all the money they want, no questions asked."

WELL, then why are you putting up with the hellbent criminals using the USA to launch and maintain wars of aggression, and other major problems and wrongs committed by the USA?

Might the reason in both cases be that The People don't have the power to direct their government, what it does, what it is allowed to do and not, etcetera? I think that's at least part of the reason.

BeForKids:

"Obama better get a clue about economics fast or Geithner will drag his administration down a rathole. I don't know what's going on there. Is Obama dazzled by Geithner's resume? ..."

OH, I doubt that Obama's dazzeled about that. He's been strongly backed by Big Finance, ... people throughout his entire political career, if we can really call it a career. He's bought-and-paid for and does as his main funders, ... dictate.

more of what we've been doing is not the answer to our trouble...less is...the road we travel from birth through church, school, work and retirement, leads us not toward a sustainable relationship with our home planet, but, rather, precisely away from such...our industrial use of the living body upon which we live is the death of all...why do we continue to attend school or work? because we know no other way...where is the school that teaches the better way? the way without electricity, without industry, without petroleum...the way that would have each individual working for their own sustenance and salvation, rather than clambering upon one another, slaughtering one another, to gain the obese comfort of the lazy...

That a worker in a given society has to WORK 52 weeks a year without vacations and or longhours without pay hardly makes it a VIRTUE.

This mantra that "In order to get ahead one has to WORK hard and put money aside and those that do NOT work as hard as XXXX do not deserve to get ahead" is part of the Corporate brainwashing.

They help build a culture where a large mass of people will labor away for 90 percent of their lives, ignoring personal time and family in order to have a "career" only because they PROFIT of this.

They earn capital off your excess labor. If it works you into the grave, if your family life ruined, if you have no time to grow spiritually or mentally because it all work all the time it no skin of their nose.

There is nothing wrong with people who want to work, but a lifetime of labor for the sake of labor is hardly the only path and pulling ones hair out to whine about the slackers is merely demanding everyone else buy into THAT given lifestyle.

Some people do not want to spend 50 hours a week for 40 years WORKING just so they can tell everyone how hard they worked.

greg r, you may call it orneriness. i'll call it honesty. and my grandfather taught me, well over a half century ago, to never shoot at a moving target. always stationary, one shot. one kill. i do agree with you, wholeheartedly, on your 6:39pm post.

mike corbeil, reread my over-generalizing post and you will see that there is only one generalization. regarding your 4:56pm post, it is good to read your comments near its ending. their work ethic is admirable, it is ethical, and it is an honest work, at the end of long days. it will bring tears to one's eyes. and it is that very work ethic that many americans fear most.

actually, chessgame, most "overworked" people tend to be of the self-employed variety. rarely does one find an overworked employee who is sitting back and reaping the rewards of paid vacation and maternity leave and sick leave and accumulated sick leave and mental health days and company vehicles and gas allowances and per diams for meals and blah blah blah.

many self-employed people do so by choice, knowing the reward of not having to punch the clock is far greater than having to answer to the man. jealousy has little, if anything, to do with the equation.