demandside

Plus Wednesday’s Idiot of the Week:  Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine and Fox News with the black helicopters of Fannie and Freddie……….

Stimulus — the casual financial reporter in all media still suggests that the new federal stimulus package will be another rebate check.  I’ve heard it too often, in spite of the signals coming up from policy makers.  We believe that checks from helicopters having been tried once should not be repeated.

For one thing, a new stimulus package will be enacted in the aftermath of an election, not in the run-up to one.  For another, the last stimulus package did not work.  As we predicted at the time, there was more whimper than bang for the 160 billion buck.

We’re going to need as efficient a use of the stimulus money as possible, particularly considering tomorrow’s GDP number, which we predict will coil your socks to the downside.

But first, it’s Wednesday, time for Idiot of the week,

Nina Easton. She’s Washington editor of Fortune magazine, where she writes the Power Play column, and a political analyst for FOX News.

Here from On Point with Tom Ashbrook.  Jack here is Jack Beatty, senior editor at The Atlantic.  Mat is Mat Bai, political writer for the New York Times Magazine.

ASHBROOK

Better source is hearsay from an unnamed Obama economist in a personal conversation.

As long as there are deep pockets in the Radical Right, we’ll have blindness like this.

This blaming of Fannie and Freddie is a complete red herring, a paper defense to the sword of reality.  But more appalling is that this woman has a place at the table.  I have the same reaction watching the NeoCons who authored the blunder of Iraq appearing as experts on foreign policy.  The arsonist being featured in a seminar on fire safety.  Or less pejoritively and more accurately, an advocate of the flat earth debating with scientists, perhaps in front of a satellite picture of the globe.  These may be expensive and well-designed tinfoil hats, but they’re still tinfoil hats.

One wishes they would find a room with the LaRouchies and stop bothering the adults.

Idiot of the week:  Nina Easton

Now on to stimulus………… with audio from EPI’s Jared Bernstein and others testifying before the House Budget Committee.  Robert Pollin is an American economist and activist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and founding co-director of its Political Economy Research Institute (PERI).  Then we look at a couple of recovery measures that increase demand without increasing the deficit.  That leads us into taxes.

BERNSTEIN

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