The Blue Board

while this is sort of true, it is also sort of false.

when an economy falls into recession, the things you can do to get out of it are all about timing.

directly after the big fall, when you become zero bound, government spending can be the smartest thing you do...

of course, economies do not behave normally when you are zero bound... Keynes was well ahead of his time

Best approach: Expect nothing. Get something.

Working two part time jobs right now, and an internship. The part time jobs take care of me now. The internship is in the hope that I gain experience that sets me up better for life after college.

Life gets a lot better when you're not waiting on a hand to feed you.

Sure, stimulus can stop the initial fall. But it has to be well spent and a plan to grow the economy after the initial injection of Gov. cash has to follow.

Ideally spend on infrastructure and things society needs, obviously this benefits us in two ways, then a plan to encourage business growth has to be put in place. As much as it pains some people, part of this is cutting taxes and loosening unnecessary regulations etc. BTW taxes don't have to stay low forever just long enough. Do this right you stop the economy from crashing and ensure an expedited recovery in which you should be able to reclaim the cash you injected into the spending projects etc. and have an improved infrastructure military or whatever.

Unfortunately governments tend to only favor the stimulus aspect. Well that doesn't work long term. Infrastructure projects can't go on forever. And the longer you have to borrow the worse financial shape you are putting your country in.

Or even worse instead of spending on things like infrastructure you bail out financial institutions and industry. Which interrupts the painful but necessary process of creative destruction and sets a terrible precedent for the future by causing business in those industries to be less risk adverse because they think they might be bailed out again. Not to mention this type of stimulus only funnels money to a few places.

It takes both, but we can't get both unfortunately.

all in all, the cutting regulations is the normalthink ideal.

of course, as we saw with the last black monday, that was complete foolishness.

deregulating industry does not free up the industry to make more money. letting the inmates run the asylum is more what it boils down to... there is no altruism in profit, regardless of what anyone says

there are very few unnecessary regulations on business. wisdom has shown us that regulations actually help businesses to be responsible to stakeholders. this is not to say that business is evil, but business without conscience, the pure capitalism model, clearly is.

coroporations are not benevolent creatures that will do the right thing because the right thing is always aligned with the most profitable thing, Ayn Rand's dumbass be damned.

there needs to be more leverage toward the rights of the worker... at some point, the division of wealth will be so slanted that all power in the hands of the worker will vanish, as, the overlords can just shut their factories down and ship all the jobs off to wherever... hell, they are soon getting to the point where even if everyone struck and boycotted, they wouldn't care, they could sit on their wealth for 100s of generations.

imbalance such as this do not serve anyone

clarification of tax codes, yeah... that makes perfect sense.

also, create tax codes without built in loopholes for the rich

redundancy, though, is generally a byproduct of the need to clarify codes... most of the redundancy comes from the law trying to convey the spirit of the law because, if you haven't noticed, many corporations try to shirk the law when they can. The statues become much more redundant every time there is a challenge, or some corporation gets away with breaking the law due to it not being crystal clear on every single little way the law can be bent.

now, if it was life and death, like if a ceo could be put to death for a wrongful interpretation of the law, well, i bet that would fix it.

i would say there are less unnecessary regulations than you think... trying to enforce corporate law is like trying to raise kids. for example, say you outlaw the color blue. well, next thing you know, corporations are all like, they said blue, not periwinkle...

getting rid of lawyers, writing things in plain english with stiff penalties for trying to get around it, those types of things would vastly improve the corporate climate... you know, then those creepy bastards would just settle for following the damn law

Heresy!

I'm going to preface this post with one statement: not all economic downturns are similar and not all are comparable.

First you're wrong about the Great Depression. Just completely wrong. After FDR was elected, yes there were spending programs put forth and they worked magnificently (GDP growth was positive until 1937 and unemployment dropped 15-17% in four years). Now where you are wrong is that is that it was nowhere near Keynesian budget deficits of magnificent proportions (the largest budget deficit was only 3%---even more small compared to modern budgets in real dollar terms).

The recession of 1937 was not wholly caused by a drop in spending. Some argue confectionary fiscal policy, but it was more a mix of cuts in spending and RAISES in taxes. Now, in and of itself, cuts in spending and saying when the government stops it doesn't work, doesn't cut it. Where it matters is when you stop. Stopping at 11% unemployment is not when you stop.

Now WWII came and all was well, so we can only stop for there, but the 1930s was not just spending by the way. FDR met with all types of groups and put forth many different (sometimes contradictory)ideas.