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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (104395)	2/17/2009 10:47:14 AM
From: Steve Lokness	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541904

John; But he's been warning about the real estate crisis for some time. I forget when he started but he's certainly not new to the game. Yes, but without understanding Austrian School thinking, you would never have been able to identify the housing bubble in time to do anything about it. The housing bubble was a symptom of the problem John. The housing bubble was a result of too much cheap credit - the very thing Austrians warn about. Once the housing bubble became self evident, it was waaaaaay too late to do anything about it. I believe Krugman saw the bubble when the rest of us did - after it was well formed. That isn't predicting anything - it is observing.

To: JohnM who wrote (104395)	2/17/2009 10:57:22 AM
From: Steve Lokness	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541904

John; And a note this morning on Krugmans weird claim that we need to spend like we did in WWII. That was from the piece you posted this weekend. Krugman claimed in that piece that it was WWII that got us our of the depression, ignoring that by any measure that counts (employment numbers and GDP) we were climbing out of the depression from 33 until the war started. When the war started Krugman conveniently forgets that Americans stopped purchasing just about everything - because they had to. You couldn't even buy a new car during the war because they were not made! People instead of consuming during the war, did just the opposite, they did what they could NOT to consume. They even had Victory Gardens to grow their own food so that our production could be instead used for the war effort. After half a decade of virtually NO CONSUMPTION, of course there would be a demand for goods. Any analogy to what happen in WWII to today is just silly. Does Krugman think we should all stop consuming for 5 years to run up demand? John, he just doesn't put things together well. He might be the smartest kid on the block, but he lacks common sense - and his arguments are just wrong.