In Paul Krugman’s blog post today, he admits he’s a bit worried about next year.
1. The economy is falling fast. We’ll see what tomorrow’s employment report says, but we could well be losing jobs at a rate of 450,000 or 500,000 a month.
2. Infrastructure spending will take time to get going — a new Goldman Sachs report suggests that projects that are “shovel-ready” are probably only a few tens of billions worth, and that a larger effort would take much of a year to get going. Meanwhile, it’s very questionable how much effect tax rebates will have on consumer demand. So it may be hard for stimulus to get much traction until late 2009 — and that’s even if Congress goes along, which may be a problem given all the bad analysis and disinformation out there.
With the lame duckiest President in my lifetime, can we afford to wait 37 days or so? The only good news I can think of is that the Obama Transition team is going to hit the ground running on January 20th. There is no time for delay, no time for cud chewing that Cheney and crew did with foreign policy prior to 9/11.
As I sit back and watch the super-capitalists come for handouts from the government and the Radical Right making excuse after excuse for the travesty they have created, I wonder if Obama is going to be drastic enough in his economic plan. I can only hope that the days of pre-Depression American capitalism are over.