Speaking of New Ideas

How to get people working again, generate revenue, reduce the deficit and stimulate the economy by increasing aggregate demand - not a new idea, but a proven one:

How to cure the unemployment problem?:

"This isn't hard. Hire people to build things with the free money the world is offering us."

Posted by Mark Thoma on Monday, August 15, 2011 at 10:08 PM in Economics, Unemployment

Or how about this:

"The only policy that will really help is an increase in aggregate demand."

"The right policy can be debated, but the important thing is for policy makers to stop obsessing about debt and focus instead on raising aggregate demand. As Bill Gross of the investment firm Pimco put it recently: “While our debt crisis is real and promises to grow to Frankenstein proportions in future years, debt is not the disease — it is a symptom. Lack of aggregate demand or, to put it simply, insufficient consumption and investment is the disease.”

Bruce Bartlett; Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul.

Or this:


"Among those calling for a mix of cuts and revenue are onetime standard-bearers of Republican economic philosophy like Martin Feldstein, an adviser to President Ronald Reagan, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., Treasury secretary to President George W. Bush, underscoring the deepening divide between party establishment figures and the Tea Party-inspired Republicans in Congress and running for the White House.
“I think the U.S. has every chance of having a good year next year, but the politicians are doing their damnedest to prevent it from happening — the Republicans are — and the Democrats to my eternal bafflement have not stood their ground,” Ian C. Shepherdson, chief United States economist for High Frequency Economics, a research firm, said in an interview.
As for the longer term, Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics research at Bank of America, wrote this week that “Given the scale of the debt problem, a credible plan requires both revenue enhancement measures and entitlement reform. Washington’s recent debt deal did not include either.”