{"id":2143,"date":"2014-10-15T16:17:46","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T21:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/?p=2143"},"modified":"2014-10-15T17:20:34","modified_gmt":"2014-10-15T22:20:34","slug":"1937-krugmans-victory-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/1937-krugmans-victory-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"1937: Krugman’s Victory Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"How<\/a>
How to NOT balance a budget<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As a Krugman fanboy, I’ve been getting a big kick out of his victory dances of late\u2013 rubbing it in\u00a0the faces of\u00a0the rightist ideologue economists, the austerians from the Austrian School of Economic Destruction. His latest end zone taunt\u00a0is a blog post entitled, simply, 1937<\/a>. (If it really were a football game, he’d have a yellow flag thrown in his face for excessive taunting. Yet\u00a0the crowd roars for more! The dance goes on to be a huge hit known as The Macro-ena! Ok, sorry.)<\/p>\n

As he has so patiently (and not-so-patiently) explained over lo these many years, 1937 was a particularly inauspicious year in applied macro-economics as the Roosevelt administration\u00a0rapidly pulled back from its alphabet soup economic stimulus programs. It was a futile attempt to balance the budget. As\u00a0everyone who took Econ 101 should have learned, it had the exact opposite effect,\u00a0throwing\u00a0the economy right back into a depressionary tailspin, making budget balancing just that much more difficult\/impossible. FDR essentially snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Obama repeated the mistake, rapidly drawing down his somewhat successful\u2013if under-amped\u2013Recovery Act,\u00a0thereby muting the incipient recovery.<\/p>\n

But at least it was something.<\/p>\n

The Europeans got straight up austerity from the get-go resulting in\u00a0all the unmerited, self-inflicted suffering of sky-high unemployment that continues to this day.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the oh-so-much-smarter-than-Americans Germans are relearning that lesson\u2013again, and again, and again\u2013 even as we speak.<\/a><\/p>\n

The lessons of 1937 have been a long-running theme of Krugman’s. Every time he references it, I keep thinking back to a very prosaic, but telling remnant literally written in the landscape in an older neighborhood of Norman, Oklahoma…<\/p>\n

…I present, my 2013 photos, “1937: The End of Road for the Works Progress Administration’s Work”:<\/p>\n

\"How<\/a>
How to NOT balance a budget<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Or, maybe “The Depression that Wasn’t Ended Now”:<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20130506_154428_182\"<\/a>
Where was Obama’s Recovery Act when our pedestrian infrastructure needed some help? This is looking pretty shovel-ready to me!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

I keep thinking Krugman\u00a0could use these as a centerpiece\/banner graphic for his blog….!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a Krugman fanboy, I’ve been getting a big kick out of his victory dances of late\u2013 rubbing it in\u00a0the faces of\u00a0the rightist ideologue economists, the austerians from the Austrian School of Economic Destruction. His latest end zone taunt\u00a0is a blog post entitled, simply, 1937. (If it really were a football game, he’d have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,760,4],"tags":[1281,1291,1292,1283,1282,1284,1288,1289,1290,1286,1285,159,550,1293,1287],"class_list":["post-2143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-economics","category-society","tag-1281","tag-american-recovery-and-reinvestment-act","tag-arra","tag-austerians","tag-austerity","tag-austrian-school-of-economic-destruction","tag-fdr","tag-franklin-delano-roosevelt","tag-great-depression","tag-keynes","tag-norman-oklahoma","tag-obama","tag-paul-krugman","tag-the-macro-ena-dance","tag-works-progress-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2143"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2154,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2143\/revisions\/2154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}