Wednesday Morning Links

I have been too busy to give each of these links their own post, so I thought I would share them together. All are brilliant and worthy of a full read, here are some quick highlights.

1. Columbia University Economist and Professor came out with his ideas, to get America Working again.

First, we must dispose two myths. One is that reducing the deficit will restore the economy. You don’t create jobs and growth by firing workers and cutting spending. The reason that firms with access to capital are not investing and hiring is that there is insufficient demand for their products. Weakening demand — what austerity means — only discourages investment and hiring.

The second myth is that the stimulus didn’t work. The purported evidence for this belief is simple: Unemployment peaked at 10 percent — and is still more than 9 percent. (More accurate measures put the number far higher.) The administration had announced, however, that with the stimulus, it would reach only 8 percent.

The administration did make one big error, which I pointed out in my book “Freefall” — it vastly underestimated the severity of the crisis it inherited.

Without the stimulus, however, unemployment would have peaked at more than 12 percent. There is no doubt that the stimulus could have been better designed. But it did bring unemployment down significantly from what it otherwise would have been. The stimulus worked. It was just not big enough, and it didn’t last long enough: The administration underestimated the crisis’s durability as well as its depth.

2. H/T Political Carnival, as Madcityman pointed out yesterday, while the audience cheered a fellow American dying a horrible death, Ron Paul Hemmed and hawed. Now we know why, it happened to his old campaign manager!

Mr. Snyder(Ron Paul’s campaign manager), 49 years old, died of complications from pneumonia on June 26 — exactly two weeks after Mr. Paul formally ended his presidential campaign. He is survived by his mother and two sisters. Friends of Mr. Snyder created a Web site on July 2 to help his family pay the estimated $400,000 in medical bills accrued because Mr. Snyder didn’t have health insurance.

3. This is the president I voted for!

“I do think that the extreme position that you hear that says government has no role to play in growing our economy, that the federal government has no function to play in building a strong middle class, is absolutely wrong,” Obama said, however.

“I reject that view. And I think the vast majority of Americans reject that view,” he said.

4. How Do I know That the recall elections were very successful? Christian Schneider says the exact opposite!

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