There are obviously more people who aren't paying attention than there is people who are paying attention. This is more for the people who are paying attention.

I don't know how many people are feeling content with the direction this country is headed. I personally haven't talked to anyone who is content. I've even talked to people who have opinions that are opposite to mine, who aren't content.

I think that most of us feel like there isn't anything that we can do. To an extend I believe that that is true. I don't however believe that that is a good enough reason to sit around and wait for things to happen. There isn't much that we can realisticly do, but doing nothing will result in nothing getting done.

I'd like to pass on a couple links to online petitions. These aren't petitions that are being driven by lefties or by righties. They are petitions that, if they recieve enough signatures, will excercise our rights as citizens of this country, afforded us by the Constitution. Rights that we, as a nation, have largely ignored. Our elected and appointed representatives are employees of, we the people. The time to assert ourselves is passing quickly.

912 Project Petitions-Petition for Redress of Grievances

WND-PETITION TO CONGRESS AND PRESIDENT
TO HALT OUT-OF-CONTROL SPENDING

There is a bit of reading involved, but it's important to know what the objective is.

I know a lot of you probably think that this kind of thing is silly. If you do, then you don't have to click on the links.

If you think that this is a good opportunity for you to do SOMETHING, please, read and sign the petitions. Please, encourage friends and family who you think might also like to do SOMETHING, to do the same.

This might just be another half baked attempt. If it is, so be it. It is SOMETHING though. It's better than doing nothing, and getting nothing done.

 

I'm in on both. Like we say down here- the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I don't have a clue if signing these has any effect but sooner or later somebody in Washington is going to see that nobody is happy with Washington. Like I have said here before, make sure to vote the next elections for your Senator and Congressman. I don't care who they are or the party they represent but vote them out. The Democrats have thrown you and your children under the bus with these incredible spending programs- like a drunk in a free liquor store. The Republicans have failed because they have done nothing to stop them. Vote for anybody except those in office. We need to clean house- literally, and cleaning the senate is also needed. Only then can we demand term limits.

 

I signed both also!

 

I've already made plans to attend the Tea Party here in Atlanta on the 15th. There are going to be a lot of celebs there and Sean Hannity will be broadcasting his Fox News show from there live at 9p.m.

I have heard that ACORN is going to be at all the tea parties to try to disrupt things. We'll see about that !

 

Whereas, history proves government spending has never succeeded in curing an economic downturn, but rather serves only to deepen and prolong it;

I'm all for controlling spending, but the above statement simply is not true.

Increased spending is what got us out of the Great Depression. Furthermore, the post WW2 years of prosperity happened concurrently with an increase in Govt.



** Note: That's not to say that ALL govt. spending is good or that there is no such thing as govt. waste. But it's incorrect to say that govt. spending has never succeeded in an economic downturn.

 

no one cares. well be living off the barter system in a few years anyway

 

Good post Wittom, as always. Put my John Han**** on both.

 

Can you expand on this, or were you joking?

I had a friend who was into bartering and was part of some bartering association. He was adamant that it was the future.

 

There's plenty of Depression Era economics experts that believe Gov't spending actually deepened and prolonged the Great Depression. One of those that believes that is actually Barack Obama's lead economics advisor, Christina Romer. She and her husband are Depression "experts". Read up on her a little bit.

You can also look to Japan in the 1990's. They thought "Stimulus" and huge Gov't spending could help their financial crisis. The 1990's in Japan are now known as The Lost Decade. History has a tendency to repeat itself when you don't learn from other's mistakes...

 

I'm familiar with the arguments that for the govt spending having caused the depression, and it involves skewing the data. For one, it entails ignoring the people who were working in public works programs. By doing so, these 'experts' argue that the unemployment rate remained higher than it actually did.

Furthermore, when FDR lowered ND spending a bit, we slipped back into Depression again.

I could be wrong of course, but this is how I see the data that's available.

I'll read up more on Christina Romer. At a quick glance, I don't see that she argues that govt. spending prolonged the Great Depression.

Romer showed that fiscal policy played a relatively small role in the recovery from the depression in the US, because taxes were raised in the US almost as quickly as government spending increased during the New Deal. However, accidental monetary policy played a large role in the US recovery from depression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Romer

 

SKRN,

Thank you for the Romer reference. Upon doing a little reading, it appears that what she believes is that the spending 'didn't work' because not enough was spent. Many Keynesians believe that FDR's spending was too little to boost demand. This is in line with that line of reasoning.

Lessons from the Great Depression for Economic Recovery in 2009
Christina D. Romer Council of Economic Advisers

One crucial lesson from the 1930s is that a small fiscal expansion has only small effects. I wrote a paper in 1992 that said that fiscal policy was not the key engine of recovery in the Depression.7 From this, some have concluded that I do not believe fiscal policy can work today or could have worked in the 1930s. Nothing could be farther than the truth. My argument paralleled E. Cary Brown’s famous conclusion that in the Great Depression, fiscal policy failed to generate recovery “not because it does not work, but because it was not tried.”


The key fact is that while Roosevelt's fiscal actions were a bold break from the past, they were nevertheless small relative to the size of the problem. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, real GDP was more than 30% below its normal trend level. (For comparison, the U.S. economy is currently estimated to be between 5 and 10% below trend.)

....


While the direct effects of fiscal stimulus were small in the Great Depression, I think it is important to acknowledge that there may have been an indirect effect. Roosevelt's very act of doing something must have come as a great relief to a country that had been suffering depression for more than three years. To have a President step up to the challenge and say the country would attack the Depression with the same fervor and strength it would an invading army surely lessened uncertainty and calmed fears. Also, signature programs such as the WPA that directly hired millions of workers no doubt contributed to a sense of progress and control. In this way, Roosevelt’s actions may have been more beneficial than the usual estimates of fiscal policy suggest. If the actions President Obama is taking in the current downturn can generate the same kind of confidence effects, they may also be more effective than estimates based on conventional multipliers would lead one to believe.


http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Fil...sons_romer.pdf

 

It would be a much easier discussion if it was only the economy that was at issue. It's far greater than that, and all Americans should realize that.

The discussion really isn't whether spending trillions of our tax dollars is going to change our disposition. It's whether our elected representatives are accurately representing the people who elect them, and if they do so within the blue print that the Founders created with the "Charters of Freedom".

Not everyone agrees that the New Deal got us out of the Great Depression, just like many of us don't believe that redistributing trillions of our hard earned dollars is going to alter the trajectory that the country will take. During the Depression area, similar to now, questions of constitutionality were prevalent. Some believe that FDR not only had great powers with in the executive and legislative branches of government, being that there was then, similar to now, a progressive movement going on, but that he also had great power within the judicial branch. Then, like now, the people, and the constitution became less and less relevant.

Brooklyn College-Was the New Deal a Constitutional Revolution?

Even if the data leads you to believe that spending tax payer dollars did get this country out of the Great Depression, you have to admit that it also created an entitlement mentality in this country that has grown exponentially.

There are several economists who have studied the data and concluded, not that spending more of the tax payers dollars would have been better, but that spending less would have allowed for a rapid recovery, like it was in the rest of the world, in this country.

UCLA-FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate

While graphs can be quite convincing to some, I think that the people who would be inclined to sign petitions like the ones that I've posted links to are seeing a much larger threat. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights aren't really complicated reading, but even without studying them, the content is quite revealing. Studying them can make some see our country completely differently than those who think that the work and wisdom of the Founders has become irrelevant, or those who just aren't paying attention.

It is supposed to be a government for the people, by the people. Over time, the government has removed the people from the equation. To a lot of us, the mortgaging of this countries future appears to be the proverbial straw that breaks the camels back. To a lot of us, saving what generations of great, hard working Americans built is worth getting involved for. The alternative, which history has told us over and over again will fail, is not something that some of us are prepared to concede to.

 

Wittcom,

Thank you for the well written response!

I agree that there is more to it than just the economy. But keep in mind, one of the links that you posted uses an economic argument (that govt. spending has never helped) to make its point.

Furthermore, look at it from the viewpoint of a man who recently lost his job and has a family to house and feed. Any arguments about the powers vested in govt. by the constitution and whether or not govt. really should be thrusting itself into the private sector doesn't even come up on the radar compared to his concerns about the economy. The economy are what's affecting real people in the here and now. (I am not talking about myself here--I don't have kids and my job seems pretty secure).

I understand that not everyone agrees that the New Deal got us out of the Great Depression. In fact, I don't believe the New Deal itself did. Rather, it was government spending that got us out. The New Deal at best (IMO) helped us through it and possible helped bring a little stimulus to the economy. True Keynesians would argue that we didn't spend enough (for example, Christina Romer who I quoted above).

In any case, WW2 was in fact government spending. The net effect on the economy would have been the same had we built these tanks and air planes and simply dumped them into the ocean. The point is, the war (funded by government spending) created more buying power, which stimulated the economy, which created more jobs, which created more buying power, etc.

Here is Paul Krugman educating one of these revisionists.

Krugman schools Will
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yAyQV8gOjo

In addition to this, it's the link that you originally posted that makes uses the claim that government spending has never helped us economically, so the fact that not everyone agrees really works against your post. My argument is simply a response to such.

 

It is true that there are economists who disagree, but this really says little. I can find creation scientists with real degrees from real universities who write articles arguing that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs existed alongside early man (meaning Adam and Eve & Co.)

In any case, I am familair with the arguments espoused in the above article.

First off the article only contains 2 economists (the article's title may mislead some to believe that there are an army of UCLA economists in on this).

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.


In other words, these workers were paid an actual living wage instead of the pittance that existed prior to this. Keep in mind, the New Deal era marks the beginning of a middle class, where average Americans could actually earn a living wage.

Furthermore, I'm not sure whose unemployment numbers they're using but I'm willing to be they're using revisionist numbers, which exclude those working in government programs (by some standards they are not counted as employed, because they technically weren't employed by an industry--but nevertheless, they were earning money for work they were doing, and spending it).

As you can see, unemployment went down after the implementation of the ND--that was the trend. But the biased article you linked to muddles the issue by using an average (which allows them to use a middle number).



Graphs show trends and display empirical data which often contradicts rhetoric. This is why the article above didn't post a graph (because it's readers would have seen the downward trend in unemployment) but instead took an "average."

I do agree that there are those who are more concerned with keeping to a strict constitution, but there are also those who want us to return to the gilded age with a rich oligarchy, vast poverty, no social safety net, and little chance for those born into less fortunate circumstances to work their way up.

Again, it's government involvement that spurned the creation of an actual middle class. Sorry for rambling, but I get kinda chatty cathy on this subject!

 

Am I reading this correctly- wittom and Labnerd are joining forces with Glenn Beck's 921 project?

God I love it.

I have been watching Glenn Beck more lately. Good stuff on the show, but damn it depresses me to watch it...