please dont act like this is some awaking for the republican when its a ploy to gain power no matter what the cost

Such comments show that conservatives are too willing to lecture the rest of us on taking personal responsibility while they themselves find ways to avoid being held accountable for their own blatant misdeeds.

I would like to ask Mr. Feldstein how fair it is that the people who caused this crisis are the ones now being bailed out, while the rest of us are the ones being made to pay for it? How fair is it that the CEO’s who presided over this disaster are virtually insulated from accountability, that they still pull down astronomical salaries?

If Tom Ashbrook ever invites another conservative spokesman like Feldstein on the program (e.g., Greenspan or Phil Gramm), he should also invite principled critics like economists Joseph Stiglitz and Dean Baker, journalist and author Naomi Klein, or Sen. Bernie Sanders on as well. The ensuing debate would no doubt be lively and, I would expect, most instructive – that is, if the spokesman would even agree to such a debate.

Perhaps Professor Stephen Marglin from Harvard who has written on the blindness that the rational man model inculcates to community would be a good source to flesh out Tom’s intuition that ethos is important to analyzing the bubble economy and it’s collapse.

Thanks Tom for giving it a shot. Now you should do a show on it.

TW

I guess you haven’t had a response to this little fact:
Worldwide solar hot water capacity added 2006:
China: 75.3%
USA: 0.4%
http://www.ren21.ne/pdf/RE2007_Global_Status_Report.pdf
Maybe there’s no sun in the US or you are not getting enough roofers, plumbers and electricians from the south of your border…

And automation in large photovoltaic factories do create many jobs for engineers and technicians.

And when one compares the infrastructure and building quality and efficiency in the US with the infrastructure and building quality and efficiency in central Europe, the US requires a lot of workers if it wants to reach a similar level.

The US might probably not have enough people to do all this work, if it wants to take the reduction from foreign resources seriously.

No, but you’re missing the point. A large swath of the economy can and will be. Modern farm tractors no longer require drivers, as they are simply put on autopilot. A satellite image tells you exactly what acres need harvesting and a GPS tells you exactly where you are in the field. High rises don’t require window washers, because there’s a robot to do that as well. Look at video of a modern auto factory: robots do all of the welding and the painting. While such technology used to require deep pockets, this is no longer the case.

The upshot is more workers chasing fewer jobs, which drives down labor rates, which is the REAL problem. We’ve reached a tipping point in our industrial economy where economic growth doesn’t depend on population growth. In other words, productivity can increase while the labor force remains stagnant and even decreases.

And the problem economically with the “green revolution” is that it simply replaces an existing industry instead of creating a new one. We already have an energy economy, albeit based on fossil fuels. As we transition to renewables, there’s no evidence that all of the labor currently used to extract fossil fuels, build and run power plants couldn’t simply transition to building and running wind farms. There will likely be a short-term employment increase as we all climb on our roofs to install solar cells, but long-term, it’s a creative destruction like when the horse and buggy builders transitioned to making cars. Now in the latter case, the build out of the road system created a massive net growth in the car industry per capita well beyond the size of the horse industry, but will that be the case for energy? Energy usage per capita is likely to decline going forward as our economy becomes more energy efficient.

Interesting little fact:
Worldwide solar hot water capacity added 2006:
China: 75.3%
USA: 0.4%
http://www.ren21.ne/pdf/RE2007_Global_Status_Report.pdf
(Either there is no sun in the US or the US doesn’t promote jobs for roofers, plumbers and electricians.)

What used to require very well paid machinists has been replaced by automated machinery that doesn’t even require that the lights be on. You don’t even need to pay a kid to sort the parts; a robot with vision does it for you. What used to require a sales force is now done by a website that costs pennies a day to run, a little blogging on the right forums, and an Ebay account. You don’t even need to print a catalog. No machinists and no sales force means no middle managers are required, just menial labor to box up orders and ship them out.

Of course, this also means that the owners of this firm take in income that, just 10 years ago, would’ve been shared amongst many more well-paid employees.

The Luddites had it right. The biggest threat to the American worker is not cheap foreign labor, it’s automation, and the pace of this technology is scary.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m dumbfounded. At a minimum it would seem that the interviewer might have questioned how more military spending is going to help a country that spends more on military than the next ten largest spenders combined. Instead Mr. Feldstein’s assertion that this is what the country needs is taken at face value.

Then instead of asking Mr. Feldstein why more tax cuts would help, the interviewer just lets him say that he would do it differently than President Obama is doing it. Didn’t we just go through eight years of non-regulation, lowered taxes and free money? Maybe I’m just not in the right income bracket, but I don’t feel like I’m living in the utopia that was going to be delivered by these policies. Unless living in the largest banana republic is all I should have expected.

Not only have these policies blown a hole in our budget, it removed any semblance of cushion and severly limited our options. Couple this with an effective fed rate of 0% and the policy prescriptions become even more constrained.

I’m not a professional economist, but I do find that common sense sayings seem to actually work a lot better than the theories espoused by many of the “experts.”

One that would seem to apply here: When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.

Perhaps Mr. Feldstein should consider this since the policies he advocates look to be very similar to the ones that are pretty discredited at this point. Or maybe, what he’s really saying is: Who am I going to believe? Him or my own eyes?

Why don’t you save the soft touch for the entertainers or people like that? The right wing punditry will never extend you the same courtesy, so take the gloves off.