Another Keynesian Failure

from Daily Pundit by Bill Quick:

Another Keynesian Failure:
Anti-Stimulus PowerPoint | The Daily Caller

A well-argued Ed Morrissey piece in The Week helps identify three distinct defects of Obama’s “public jobs” stimulus:

1) The “shovel ready” jobs weren’t shovel ready (as Obama himself has admitted), leading to a delay in the stimulating effect;

2) The money to save the jobs of  “firemen … and policemen … and … teachers” did not just go to firefighters and policemen and teachers. It also went to non-essential bureaucrats (e.g., headquarters paper shufflers, “diversity coordinators”);

3) The money bailed out states that were paying unsustainable pensions and benefits, enabling them to keep paying those benefits, so that when the federal subsidy ran out the states couldn’t afford to keep workers on the payroll and laid them off. (Wisconsin, by cutting back on benefits and collective bargaining, could afford to avoid big layoffs, says Morrissey).

Note that these criticisms apply even if you think countercyclical Keynesian spending helps (as I do) and that public jobs are a good way to do that (ditto). None of the objections would have applied to a Roosevelt-style WPA that immediately put the unemployed to work on useful construction jobs. They’re criticisms of BHO, not FDR. …

Mickey confuses me. He claims to be a liberal, yet his eyes are sort of wide open – he certainly notices all the failures of liberalism. Well, most of them.
FDR’s policies didn’t work, either.

Keynesian depressions suck.