This is not an issue of power for the simple reason that the feds already have the power. Read some SC cases on this, starting with Youngstown Sheet and Tube in 1952, and it's clear. So doing what I'm suggesting is not giving up power, because we don't have it in the first place. The federal government is currently choosing not to exercise the power that it has under the Constitution. You may approve of that course of action (or non-action as the case may be), but don't mistake the government's choice as its not having the power. It does. And, as I say, this would be a temporary thing, like maybe a month. The alternative, which you seem to support, is to continue pumping taxpayer money into the credit system in the increasingly vain hope that banks will resume doing what they should have been doing all along. The obvious question is "how's that working?" The obvious answer is "not at all."

Banks are private institutions, but they serve a vital public function, which should be obvious at this point - they provide the cash and credit for the whole system on which we all depend, to function. They do that reasonably well 99.9% of the time. But when they don't, disaster can occur. Someone needs to require the banks to perform the public functions they usually perform without question. They're not doing it, so we the people should do it for them until they get the message and start doing it themselves.

It's worth remembering that banking operations are always pro-cyclical. Whatever economic cycle we're in at any given time, inflationary or recessionary, banks make it worse. In inflationary times, they lend money like mad because they're confident of repayment which tends to overheat the economy. In recessionary times they tend to tighten up because they're afraid they won't get repaid, again making the situation worse. We're in recessionary times now and guess what? they've all but stopped lending. That is irresponsible in the extreme and it is entirely appropriate for the feds to stop asking, stop bribing and start forcing them to do what needs to be done.

but movies or other fiction in which a character is relentlessly upbeat rely on nothing ever too serious happening to that character and thereby take on a fairy-tale quality. People who experience real trauma, real pain, real disappointment, etc. aren't Pollyannas. "Happy" and "lucky" often go hand in hand.

should read Keynes before opining on him. To say that the U.S. government should go on a spending spree rather ignores the fact that we've been doing just that for the past 5 years or so. Conason hasn't noticed that for several years we've been running record deficits and, with the latest spate or spending have far eclipsed those. In short, we've stimulated the economy on that part of the fiscal side.

The part of Keynes we've ignored despite knowing its validity is the part about redistributing income downward in order to enhance aggregate demand. Tax cuts for the wealthy have meant the poor have borne an increased share of the federal tax burden. That, plus jobs going overseas, plus the weakness of unions and labor laws, plus an insufficient minimum wage, etc. have resulted in the often-remarked-upon widening gap between rich and poor. What Keynes taught us and what we've doggedly ignored these past several years (since 1980 really), is that, apart from being immoral, that's bad for the economy. The poor and middle class tend to spend any additional dollars they get while the wealthy use theirs to buy more bonds. The one enhances aggregate demand while the other does not.

So what we need to do is to reverse the economically loony tax cuts for the wealthy and invest that money in good jobs (meaning those that can't be outsourced) for the poor and middle class. Infrastructure repair and improvement would be a good place to start. That won't mean deficit spending necessarily, but it will start to correct the radical imbalance of wealth in this country and improve the economy to boot.

to the effect that what Conason says is standard economics. If only it were. A few years ago I found myself at a dinner table with a young woman who had a Ph.D in economics. I took the opportunity to try to pick her brain on a few macro concepts and she readily admitted that she had no idea of what I was talking about. She was smart and well-versed in her field, but she just had no clue about Keynesian "basics."

Even longer ago, I read somewhere that the new basic econ textbook that replaced Samuelson had the term "aggregate demand" in it exactly once.

So it seems basic concepts are no longer so basic. We're having to learn all over again the things we've actually known for decades. And of course many of us have been hollering about this for years - that our public policies directly contradict known economic facts.

join the rest of the world which knows that the WSJ editorial page is routinely dishonest. It's why I don't subscribe to what is otherwise perhaps the best daily paper in the country. They just don't feel constrained to deal with facts or principled argument. I think the one that finally turned me away was when they recycled the ridiculous right-wing trope that money spent on taxes is in some way "taken out of" the economy, and therefore is a drain on it. Their phrase was (and I'm not making this up) "it goes away," meaning that the money paid in taxes "goes away." Really, that was in a editorial in a major U.S. newspaper.

If you read the WSJ editorial page looking for intellectual honesty, you'll read a long, long time.