Deficit spending worked in the Depression because THE GOVERNMENT WAS NOT IN DEBT (or very much) then.

Wrong.

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

Take a look at that link, or click my signature.

This is what I mean. I don't really care what side of any political fence you claim to be, people here declaiming in the most outraged tones about this article are doing so not having the slightest idea what they're actually talking about. As several others have pointed out.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman said at the start that this administration was shooting too low last year, and events since then have shown that he was actually right.

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sees it the same way and supports the idea of a second stimulus:

http://blog.rebeltraders.net/2009/08/08/keynesian-economics-joseph-stiglitz-supports-a-second-stimulus-but-where-are-we-headed/

I mean, again, obviously everyone has an opinion and is entitled to type it anywhere they want, it's just a shame that Salon has become mostly filled with utterly nonsensical rants.

Interestingly, I had actually grabbed a link to Stiglitz's proposal that presented it and also a (mild) critique of it. Which is good, those are worth reading also. (It didn't claim that any deficit will destroy us.)

Here's a direct link to Stiglitz proposing the second stimulus.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/10/economy-stimulus-bailout

Okay let's look at at this way then. At the start of the war, with a debt at 52%, then running that up to 120% was a good idea, you would agree? It lifted us out of the Depression.

Yet a debt of 70%, that's a totally different story? That's real debt? And we shouldn't have dared raise it at all from there, like they did back in the 40s, because it will lead to disaster?

So by that logic then in the 1940s when they had increased that 52% they should have stopped at 72%? Running it up to 120% was clearly going to bankrupt the country forever, according to you?

Did it?

As far as the "debt as a percentage of GDP" well listen, you're the one who brought up debt ;) As the difference between then and now, and the reason we shouldn't trust running up a deficit now like we did then.

Re our "experts", well pardon me if I'm going to listen to several Nobel prize winners in economics, plus people like Reich rather than people who write letters to Salon ;) Including me.

I'm just quirky that way, people who've spent lifetimes studying certain issues sometimes know more about them than people who read blogs.

So far, Krugman's predictions have come true. I was actually more skeptical of what he was saying until I saw that. I'm going with him and the others, for now.

Not that it matters, the Administration won't listen to Krugman or Reich. Much to our detriment.

Do you really see no difference between deficit spending in the Depression, and additional deficit spending by an already hugely indebted government?

I don't know what to tell you at this point. I already described how the US did in fact have lots of debt at the start of WWII, and yes going forward and creating more of a deficit still worked to jump us out of the Depression. How is this possible if any deficit past our 70% starting point is such a disaster? They got to 120%. It came down when the economy got back on track.

The facile analogy that WWII era America was a young couple with lots of earning potential to come, and now we're a doddering old couple who are about to retire or get fired is entirely lost on me, sorry. These principles don't drastically change depending on how you or others feel in terms of being optimistic or pessimistic about the country's future. If the economy is doomed to never pick itself out of recession at all then we should all just give up, and then we'd be like Japan for the last number of years. No thanks.

Experts can be right or wrong, but what can you do? Trust people who know nothing about the field at all? And by the way, equating Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Riech with Michael Milkin wasn't a convincing way to discredit "experts" if you ask me.

Myself, I'm very frustrated that these voices of experience and prize-winning economics chops are shouted down by much louder voices with no or very little economic credentials, mostly on the right but clearly not in your case, who warn of inflation when we were actually facing DEflation, who warn about deficit spending when by all historic measures it's just what's needed, and on and on.

Why don't we talk about the real monsters in this world - Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden

Right, because no one has ever done that.

We didn't talk about them endlessly, constantly, with every breath for the last nine years, we didn't in fact use them as the justification for raging across the world torturing people, picking people up off the street in other countries and bundling them into flights to countries that tortured them for us, and all the rest of it.

If you say so.

I mean, what is the point? We despise and condemn terrorists, and rightly so, because they break our rules of moral conduct, we find their acts despicable. So if we become torturers, then whats the point? Then our only justification for the whole effort is "Because we're bigger"?

"Why don't we talk about Ahmadinejad and Bin Laden", good grief. Yes, maybe someone should mention "9/11" also, no one has EVER done that. I think Rudy Guiliani still has some pauses in his speeches where he occasionally takes a breath, he could insert a few more 9/11s there.