Alas, when Milton Friedman announced the epimistological if not operational triumph of Lord Keynes, he was unable to imagine the moronism that has taken hold of the Republicans.

Where a thorough going communitarian revolution in the relationship of government to the economy is called for, we will hear, in response,

Cut taxes.

(Which would work if the cut tax were the payroll tax, to zero, for, say, a year--including zeroing out the employer's part so it could go directly to the employee)

Is anybody else absolutely terrified?

McCain is so screwed. This is what you get when you keep taking money out of the pockets of working class people and give it to investors and corporate executives. When the masses lose buying power the economy has to suffer. How is it the dumb bastards running both the country and the financial system don't understand this? And I have to laugh at all the corporate money being poured into the sales and marketing effort that is going in the toilet. The people on the receiving end of it don't have a nickel to spare. Current TV ads extolling the financial benefits of home ownership are a hoot in the present circumstance. NAFTA is really SHAFTA as far as I can tell. Move as many good paying manufacturing jobs as possible to low wage countries and this is the result. A middle class with empty pockets, no prospects, working 60 or 70 hrs/wk and trying to get by in an economy that sucks every last dime from a paycheck. We are a country, that is not only not moving forward, but one in reverse gear if ever there was one.

American Public Media's radio show Marketplace had an opinion piece by David Frum on Wednesday evening [http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/03/05/meaw_pm_adv_unlearning/] that addresses the poor choices and false steps policy makers are taking:

TESS VIGELAND: One of the questions that keeps coming up in this whole mortgage mess is, how do we not learn from our mistakes when it comes to market manias?

When it comes to lessons about the economy, commentator David Frum reminds us that the definition of "insanity" is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

DAVID FRUM: Economists have learned some lessons from past recessions. For instance, emergency tax and spending bills seldom do any good. Fiscal stimulus almost always arrives too late, after the recovery has already begun. Worse, the usual result is a net economic nothing. The government borrows to give to consumers, who in turn use the money to reduce borrowing. Demand remains constant.

One economist famously compared fiscal stimulus to attempting to refill a swimming pool by dipping a bucket into the deep end of a swimming pool and pouring the water into the shallow end.

Here's another lesson. Oil prices are reaching extreme highs. That's happened before. After the first shock, consumers substituted and conserved. Americans used less oil in 1988 than they did in 1978. Then the price slumped and slumped again. Conservation went out of style. Policymakers sadly realized that they had missed an opportunity.

OK, the price is high again. This is the perfect moment to pass a standby energy tax, a tax that would kick in when the price of oil falls below say $60 a barrel. Consumers could feel secure that if they make the investment in a hybrid car, or a smaller house with a shorter commute, they won't feel like fools in four or five years, but that's not what Congress is doing. Instead, Congress is planning a round of crowd-pleasing kicks at the oil companies that will do nothing to promote American energy security.

A third lesson, big banks are stuck with hundreds of billions in bad real estate loans. That's also happened before, in the 1980s savings and loan crisis. Back then, everybody had to learn that the best way to unravel bad credit was fast. Yet once again we're hearing prominent politicians urging rate freezes and foreclosure moratoriums, postponing the inevitable at great cost.

We like to think that we get smarter as we get older, and that society makes intellectual progress from year to year -- not on present evidence. It would be bad enough if we did not know better. It's worse. We have unlearned what we do know.

Why should Nader put a tax on "Wall Street speculation" when by far the most widespread and dangerous speculation of the last ten years has been undertaken by self-styled home "owners" who have taken out enormous risky leveraged bets on the real estate market?

2/3rds of the U.S. economy is consumption oriented. It's obvious that we are a demand driven economy (what economy isn't?). Nobody does nothing if there is no demand for it.

The supply side stuff is just b.s. to implement wealth redistribution in favor of the rich. To reverse all of this, what's really needed is only a level playing field.

I haven't been able to find decent employment in years. I teach English in Asia at one fifth my old pay as a designer of info sys, so that they can come and do my old job at half the pay I used to do it. And of course, I don't get to bid against them for that. I am a credit card wage slave now to boot.

For all practical purposes, the Bush administration has destroyed my life. Every time I stood a chance at getting a job Bush would sign an executive order to increase the number of H1B visas and then my chances plumeted. This after I left the job market for a couple of years to get an advance degree.

At last I see some demand picking up, but I am stuck in Asia. My guess is that they've cut back on H1Bs because it's an election year. That will put more purchasing power in a lot of peoples pockets and firm of the economy a tad. I'm sure that their policy is: 3 years favoring big wigs, 1 year (election years) through the rabble some scraps.

For all practical purposes, my life is ruined. Thank you Republican party.

The rage inside me is seething. I'd love nothing more than to have ten minutes alone with George Bush and a pip wrench in my hand.

Re: The employer survey also misses [estimates?] first-year start up firms, which also causes it to understate [or overstate?] employment.

I'm not sure what you mean by the above (unless you are just disagreeing with me for the sake of being disagreeable). It's a known deficiency that the BLS survey does not capture first-year start-ups for the simple reason that its employer database is a year out of date (it derives I think from SSA records). So anyone working at a first-year start-up is not going to show up in the survey. That's probably not a lot of people since start-up firms tend not to have a lot of employees. Still, it creates a bias toward understating (not overstating) the number of people employed. A small, perhaps negligible, bias, but not as you seem to be suggesting one that points in the opposite direction.
If you have any information as to how the survey deals with self-employment I'd be happy to learn it. I can't imagine the survey would simply ignore self-employed people since that is a significant number of people and its figures would seriously comprised toward showing fewer people working than are if it did ignore them. There are figures available from the IRS showing the number of people who file Schedule C, but that would be complicated by the fact that some people have both employment and self-employment income (I am one of those people). And of course those numbers will not necessarily be up to date; the data lag is probably at least one year.

Re: I gather you've never stumbled across the BLS's birth-death model without an understanding of which you cannot talk knowledgeably or sensibly about the CES.

Look, I asked you nicely to explain your rather sarcastic comments. Apparently you are just doing drive-by insults and have no desire to have an intelligent discussion or even to answer honest questions. Either you have some arcane knowledge about these topics or you don't. If not, why not shut up and quite snarling at other people simply because they are not kowtowing to you.