–If you were President, what would you do about the economy?

Imagine you are President of the United States. What would you do about the economy? To help clarify your thoughts, here are excerpts from two articles that appeared in the 4/28/11 Washington post:

Economic growth slows to 1.8% in early 2011 By Neil Irwin

The economy’s growth slowed at the start of the year, according to new data that show the recovery is so weak that it doesn’t take much to knock it off its stride.

The 1.8 percent pace of increase in gross domestic product in the first quarter, according to a Commerce Department report Thursday, is down from a 3.1 percent gain in the final months of 2010. It is also lower than the level of growth that, over time, would be expected to drive down joblessness. The U.S. economy needs to grow about 2.5 percent annually to keep unemployment steady given continual growth in the labor force and in worker efficiency; even stronger GDP growth is needed to bring unemployment down . . . . at a time when the government is straining for ways to jump-start the economy and when forecasts had called for a strong start to the year, the slowdown came as a disappointment.

So clearly, the economy has not yet recovered from the recession, and may be sinking back into the pit. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their health care, lost their ability to attend college (or even high school) and lost their futures and their children’s futures. They see threats to Social Security, our infrastructure, our medical and scientific research, our schools and our safety.

Now read this:

More Democrats defiant on debt ceiling By Peter Wallsten

A growing number of Democrats are threatening to defy the White House over the national debt, joining Republican calls for deficit cuts as a requirement for consenting to lift the country’s borrowing limit. Defying the White House, the senators are joining Republicans in calling for deficit reductions as a condition for lifting $14.3 trillion ceiling.
[ . . . ]
And although many lawmakers and aides say a bipartisan deal is likely, the insistence on conditions by a small but pivotal group of Democrats suggests that any agreement would almost certainly have to include substantial cuts in the deficit. . .

The Tea (formerly Republican) Party, and now even the Democrats all want deficit spending to be reduced and the economy stimulated. So, Mr. President, what should you do?

(Can the madness of Congress and the debt-hawks be made any clearer than this?)

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com

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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. It’s been 40 years since the U.S. became Monetarily Sovereign, and neither Congress, nor the President, nor the Fed, nor the vast majority of economists and economics bloggers, nor the preponderance of the media, nor the most famous educational institutions, nor the Nobel committee, nor the International Monetary Fund have yet acquired even the slightest notion of what that means.

Remember that the next time you’re tempted to ask a dopey teenager, “What were you thinking?” He’s liable to respond, “Pretty much what your generation was thinking when it screwed up the economy.”